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ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS 

SHAKESPEARE 



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ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS 



SHAKESPEARE 



BY 



WALTER RALEIGH 

FELLOW OF MAGDALEN COLLEGE, AND PROFESSOR OF 
ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 
1907 

^// rights reserved 



.7?3 



LIBRARY of CONGRESS 
Two CoDles Received 

APK SO 1907 

/I tepynsrht Entry 

CLASS A aXc, No» 
/ 7Z/L sfyy: 

COPY B. 



hakospoariana 



CJOPTEIOHT, 1907, 

By the MAOMILLAN COMPANY. 



Set up and electrotyped. Published April, 1907. 



Noriwpolr Press 

J. 8. Cusliing & Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. 

Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER I 

PAGE 

Shakespeare 1 



CHAPTER II 
Stratford and London 29 

CHAPTER III 
Books and Poetry 63 

CHAPTER IV 
The Theatre • . 94 

CHAPTER V 
Story and Character 128 

CHAPTER VI 
The Last Phase 209 

Index 229 



7 



SHAKESPEARE 

CHAPTER I 

SHAKESPEARE 

Every age has its own difficulties in the appreciation 
of Shakespeare. The age in which he lived was too 
near to him to see him truly. From his contem- 
poraries, and those rare and curious inquirers who 
collected the remnants of their talk, we learn that 
" his Plays took well '^ ; and that he was " a handsome, 
well shaped man ; very good company, and of a very 
ready and pleasant smooth wif The easy-going and 
casual critics who were privileged to know him in life 
regarded him chiefly as a successful member of his 
own class, a prosperous actor-dramatist, whose energy 
and skill were given to the business of the theatre and 
the amusement of the play-going public. There was no 
one to make an idol of him while he lived. The newly 
sprung class to which he belonged was despised and 
disliked by the majority of the decent burgesses of 
the City of London; and though the players found 
substantial favour at the hands of the Court, and 
were applauded and imitated by a large following of 
young law-students and fashionable gallants, yet this 
favour and support brought them none the nearer to 
social consideration or worshipful esteem. In the City 
the}^ were enemies, "the caterpillars of a common- 
wealth " ; at the Court they were servants, and service 
is no heritage. It was not until the appearance of 

B 1 



2 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

the Folio Edition of 1623, that Shakespeare's dramatic 
writings challenged the serious attention of " the great 
variety of readers/' From that time onward, his fame 
steadily advanced to the conquest of the world. Ben 
Jonson in his verses prefixed to the Folio, though he 
makes the largest claims for his friend, yet invokes 
him first of all as the " Soul of the Age, the applause, 
delight, the wonder of our Stage." Milton, some nine 
years later, considers him simply as the author of a 
marvellous book. The readers of Shakespeare took 
over from the fickle players the trust and inheritance 
of his fame. An early example of purely literary 
imitation, by a close student of his works, may be 
seen in Sir John Suckling's plays, which are fuller 
of poetic than of dramatic reminiscence. While the 
Eestoration theatre mangled and parodied the tragic 
masterpieces, a new generation of readers kept alive 
the knowledge and heightened the renown of the 
written word. Then followed two centuries of enor- 
mous study; editions, annotations, treatises, huddled 
one upon another's neck, until, in our own day, the 
plays have become the very standard and measure of 
poetry among all English-speaking peoples. 

So Shakespeare has come to his own, as an English 
man of letters ; he has been separated from his fellows, 
and recognised for what he is : perhaps the greatest 
poet of all time ; one who has said more about hu- 
manity than any other writer, and has said it better ; 
whose works are the study and admiration of divines 
and philosophers, of soldiers and statesmen, so that 
his continued vogue upon the stage is the smallest 
part of his immortality ; who has touched many spirits 
finely to fine issues, and has been for three centuries 
a source of delight and understanding, of wisdom and 
consolation. 



1.] SHAKESPEARE 8 

The mistakes which beset our modern criticism of 
Shakespeare are not likely to be the mistakes of care- 
lessness and undervaluation. We can hardly even join 
in Ben Jonson's confession, and say that we honour 
his memory ^' on this side idolatry." We are idolaters 
of Shakespeare, born and bred. Our sin is not in- 
difference, but superstition — which is another kind of 
ignorance. In all the realms of political democracy 
there is no equality like that which a poet exacts from his 
readers. He seeks for no convertites nor worshippers, 
but records his ideas and impressions of life and society 
in order that the reader may compare them with his 
own. If the impressions tally, sympathy is born. If 
not, the courteous reader will yet find matter for 
thought. The indispensable preliminary for judging 
and enjoying Shakespeare is not knowledge of his his- 
tory, not even knowledge of his works, but knowledge 
of his theme, a wide acquaintance with human life and 
human passion as they are reflected in a sensitive and 
independent mind. The poets, and but few others, 
have approached him from the right point of view, 
with the requisite ease and sincerity. There is no 
writer who has been so laden with the impertinences 
of prosaic enthusiasm and learned triviality. There is 
no book, except the Bible, which has been so misread, 
so misapplied, or made the subject of so many idle 
paradoxes and ingenuities. The most careless and 
casual lines in his plays have been twisted and squeezed 
in the hope that they will yield some medicinal secret. 
His poetry has been cut into minute indigestible frag- 
ments, and used like wedding-cake, not to eat, but to 
dream upon. The greatest poet of the modern world 
is at this day widely believed to have been also the 
most irrelevant, and to have valued the golden casket 
of his verse chiefly as a hiding-place for the odds 



4 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

and ends of personal gossip. These are the penalties 
to be paid by great poets when their works become 
fashionable. 

Even wiser students of poetry have found it hard 
to keep their balance. Since the rise of Komantic 
criticism, the appreciation of Shakespeare has become 
a kind of auction, where the highest bidder, however 
extravagant, carries off the prize. To love and to 
be wrse is not given to man; the poets themselves 
have run to wild extremes in their anxiety to find 
all Shakespeare in every part of him ; so that it 
Jias come to be almost a mark of insensibility to 
consider his work rationally and historically as a 
whole. Infinite subtlety of purpose has been attri- 
buted to him in cases where he accepted a story as 
he found it, or half contemptuously threw in a few 
characters and speeches to suit the requirements of 
his Elizabethan audience. Coleridge, for example, 
finds it " a strong instance of the fineness of Shake- 
speare's insight into the nature of the passions, that 
Romeo is introduced already love-bewildered," doting 
on Eosaline. Yet the whole story of Romeo's passion 
for Rosaline is set forth in Arthur Brooke's poem, 
from which Shakespeare certainly drew the matter 
of his play. Again, the same great critic asserts that 
"the low soliloquy of the Porter" in Macbeth, was 
"written for the mob by some other hand, perhaps 
with Shakespeare's consent"; and that "finding it 
take, he with the remaining ink of a pen otherwise 
employed, just interpolated the words — *I'll devil- 
porter it no further : I had thought to have let in some 
of all professions, that go the primrose way to the 
everlasting bonfire.' Of the rest not one syllable 
has the ever-present being of Shakespeare." That is 
to say, Coleridge does not like the Porter's speech, 



I.] SHAKESPEARE 5 

SO lie denies it to Shakespeare. But one sentence in 
it is too good to lose, so Shakespeare must be at hand 
to write it. This is the very ecstasy of criticism, and 
sends us back to the cool and manly utterances of 
Dryden, Johnson, and Pope with a heightened sense 
of the value of moderation and candour. 

There is something noble and true, after all, in 
these excesses of religious zeal. To judge Shakespeare 
it is necessary to include his thought in ours, and 
the mind instinctively recoils from the audacity of 
the attempt. On his characters we pass judgment 
freely; as we grow familiar with them, we seem to 
belong to their world, and to be ourselves the pawns, 
if not the creatures, of Shakespeare's genius. We 
are well content to share in this dream-life, which is 
so marvellously vital, so like the real world as we 
know it; and we are unwilling to be awakened. 
How should the dream judge the dreamer? By 
what insolent device can we raise ourselves to a 
point outside the orbed continent of Shakespeare's 
life-giving imagination ? How shall we speak of his 
character, when the very traits of that character are 
themselves men and women ? Almost all the Eomantic 
critics have felt the difficulty; most of them have 
refused to face it, preferring to plunge themselves 
deeper under the spell of the enchantment, and to 
liug the dream. They have busied themselves ar- 
dently and curiously with Shakespeare's creatures, 
and have satisfied their feelings towards the creator 
by raising to him, from time to time, an impassioned 
bymn of praise. 

Yet Shakespeare was a man, and a writer : there 
was no escape for him ; when he wrote, it was him- 
self that he related to paper, his own mind that he 
revealed. Some men write so ill that their true selves 



6 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

are almost completely concealed beneath their ragged 
and incompetent speech. May it be said that others 
write so well, with so large and firm a grasp of men 
and things, that they pass beyond our ken on the 
other side ? In one sense, perhaps, it may. There 
is much that we do not know about Shakespeare, 
and it includes almost all that in our daily traffic with 
our fellows we judge to be significant, characteristic, 
illuminative. We know so little one of another, that 
we are thankful for the doubtful information given 
by thumb-marks and finger-prints, tricks of gesture, 
and accidental flaws in the clay. It is often by our 
littlenesses that we are most familiarly known; and 
here our knowledge of Shakespeare fails us. What 
we do know of him is so essential that it seems im- 
personal. All this detective machinery he has made 
of no account by opening his mind and heart to us. 
If we desire to know how he wore his hat, or what 
were his idiosyncrasies of speech, it is chiefly because 
we feel that these things might be of value as signs 
and indications. But a lifetime of such observations 
and inferences could not tell us one-tenth part of 
what he has himself revealed to us by the more potent 
and expressive way of language. If we knew his 
littlenesses we should be none the^ wiser : they would 
lie to us, and dwarf him. He has freed us from the 
deceits of these makeshifts ; and those who feel that 
their knowledge of Shakespeare must needs depend 
chiefly on the salvage of broken facts and details, are 
his flunkeys, not his friends. " Did these bones cost 
no more the breeding but to play at loggats with 'em ? '' 
It would be pleasant, no doubt, to unbend the mind 
in Shakespeare's company; to exchange the white- 
heat of the smithy for the lazy ease of the village- 
green; to see him put off his magic garment, and 



I.] SHAKESPEARE 7 

fall back into the dear inanities of ordinary idle con- 
versation. This pleasure is denied to us. But to 
know him as the greatest of artisans, when he collects 
his might and stands dilated, his imagination aflame, 
the thick-coming thoughts and fancies shaping them- 
selves, under the stress of the central will, into a thing 
of life — this is to know him better, not worse. The 
rapid, alert reading of one of the great plays brings us 
nearer to the heart of Shakespeare than all the faith- 
ful and laudable business of the antiquary and the 
commentator. 

But here we are met by an objection which is strong 
in popular favour and has received some measure of 
scholarly support. It is denied that we can find the 
man Shakespeare in his plays. He is a dramatic poet ; 
and poetry, the clown says, is feigning. His enor- 
mously rich creative faculty has given us a long pro- 
cession of fictitious persons who are as real to us as 
our neighbours ; a large assembly, including the most 
diverse characters — Hamlet and Falstaff, Othello and 
Thersites, Imogen and Mrs. Quickly, Dogberry and 
Julius Caesar, Cleopatra and Audrey — and in this 
crowd the dramatist conceals himself, and escapes. 
We cannot make him answerable for anything that he 
says. He is the fellow in the cellarage, who urges on 
the action of the play, but is himself invisible. 

It is a plausible objection, and a notable tribute to 
Shakespeare's success in producing the illusions which 
are the machinery of his art. But it would never be 
entertained by an artist, and would have had short 
shrift from any of the company that assembled at the 
Mermaid Tavern. No man can walk abroad save on 
his own shadow. No dramatist can create live char- 
acters save by bequeathing the best of himself to the 
children of his art, scattering among them a largess 



8 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

of his own qualities, giving, it may be, to one his wit^ 
to another his philosophic doubt, to another his love 
of action, to another the simplicity and constancy that 
he finds deep in his own nature. There is no thrill of 
feeling communicated from the printed page but has 
first been alive in the mind of the author ; there was 
nothing alive in his mind that was not intensely and 
sincerely felt. Plays like those of Shakespeare cannot 
be written in cold blood ; they call forth the man's 
whole energies, and take toll of the last farthing of 
his wealth of sympathy and experience. In the plays 
we may learn what are the questions that interest 
Shakespeare most profoundly and recur to his mind 
with most insistence; we may note how he handles 
his story, what he rejects, and what he alters, chang- 
ing its purport and fashion ; how many points he is 
content to leave dark; what matters he chooses to 
decorate with the highest resources of his romantic art, 
and what he gives over to be the sport of triumphant 
ridicule ; how in every type of character he empha- 
sises what most appeals to his instinct and imagination, 
so that we see the meaning of character more plainly 
than it is to be seen in life. We share in the emotions 
that are aroused in him by certain situations and 
events; we are made to respond to the strange im-> 
aginative appeal of certain others ; we know, more 
clearly than if we had heard it uttered, the verdict 
that he passes on certain characters and certain kinds 
of conduct. He has made us acquainted with all that 
he sees and all that he feels, he has spread out before 
us the scroll that contains his interpretation of the 
world ; — how dare we complain that he has hidden 
himself from our knowledge ? 

The main cause of these difficulties is a misconception 
of the nature of poetry, and of the workings of a poet's. 



I.] SHAKESPEARE 9 

mind. Among readers of poetry there are men and 
women not a few who challenge a poet to deliver a 
short statement of his doctrine and creed. To positive 
and rigid natures the roundness of the world is be- 
wildering ; they must needs have a four-square scheme 
of things, mapped out in black and white ; and when 
they meet with anything that does not fit into their 
scheme, they do not " as a stranger give it welcome " ; 
they either ignore it, or treat it as a monster. They 
are perfectly at ease with general maxims and prin- 
ciples, which are simple only because they are partly 
false. What does not admit of this kind of statement 
they incline to treat as immoral, not without some 
sense of personal indignity. They ask a poet what he 
believes, and the answer does not satisfy them. A 
poet believes nothing but what he sees. The power of 
his utterance springs from this, that all his statements 
carry with them the immediate warrant of experience. 
Where dull minds rest on proverbs and apply them, he 
reverses the process ; his brilliant general statements 
of truth are sudden divinations born of experience, 
sparks thrown out into the darkness from the luminous 
centre of his own self-knowledge. Dramatic genius, 
which is sometimes treated as though it could dispense 
with experience, is in truth a capacity for experience, 
and for widening and applying experience by intelli- 
gence and sympathy. When we find a poet speaking 
confidently of matters that seem to lie wholly outside 
the possible limits of his own immediate knowledge, 
we are tempted to credit him with magic powers. We 
are deceived ; we forget the profusion of impressions 
that are poured in upon us, every day and every hour, 
through the channels of the senses, so that the quickest 
mind cannot grasp or realise a hundredth part of them. 
A story has often been told of an ignorant servant-girlj. 



10 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

wlio in the delirium of fever recited long screeds of 
Hebrew, which she had learned, all unconsciously, from 
overhearing the mntterings of the Hebrew scholar who 
was her master. The fine frenzy of a poet's brain gives 
to it something of the same abnormal quickness of ap- 
prehension and memory. When the mind is stirred 
by passion, or heated by the fire of imagination, all 
kinds of trivial and forgotten things rise to the surface 
and take on a new significance. 

Try as we may, we can never find Shakespeare 
talking in vague and general terms of that which lay 
beyond his ken. He testifies of what he knows. But 
if we attempt to argue backwards and to recreate his 
personal history from a study of his cosmic wisdom, 
we fall into a trap. There are so many ways of learn- 
ing a thing; and so many of the most important les- 
sons are repeated daily. Take any random example 
of Shakespeare's lore : 

How oft the sight of means to do ill deeds 
Make deeds ill done. 

Or, again : 

O Opportunity, thy guilt is great ; 
'Tis thou that execut'st the traitor's treason ; 
Thou set'st the wolf where he the lamb may get ; 
Whoever plots the sin, thou point'st the season. 

It is reasonable to think that there were events and 
moments in Shakespeare's life which brought this 
truth home to him. But who can guess what they 
were ? The truth itself is proved and known by every 
infant. A similar insecurity attaches to almost all 
inferences made from Shakespeare's writings to the 
events of his life. He speaks with unmistakably deep 
feeling of the faithlessness of friends, of inequality in 



I.] SHAKESPEARE 11 

the marriage-bond, of lightness in woman, and of lust 
in man. Phantom events have been fitted to all these 
utterances ; and indeed many of them do irresistibly 
suggest a background of bitter personal reminiscence. 
But the generative moments between exj^erience and 
his soul have passed beyond recovery, as they were 
doubtless many of them lost to his own remembrance 
long before he died. What remains is the child of his 
passion ; and that child is immortal. 

There is a description in Johnson's account of his 
friend Savage which might be more extensively ap- 
plied to the workings of poetic, and particularly of 
dramatic, genius. " His mind," says Johnson, " was 
in an uncommon degree vigorous and active. His 
judgment was accurate, his apprehension quick, and his 
memory so tenacious, that he was frequently observed 
to know what he had learned from others, in a short 
time, better than those by whom he was informed ; 
and could frequently recollect incidents, with all their 
combination of circumstances, which few would have 
regarded at the present time, but which the quickness 
of his apprehension impressed upon him. He had the 
art of escaping from his own reflections, and accommo- 
dating himself to every new scene. To this quality is 
to be imputed the extent of his knowledge, compared 
with the small time which he spent in visible en- 
deavours to acquire it. He mingled in cursory conver- 
sation with the same steadiness of attention as others 
apply to a lecture; and amidst the appearance of 
thoughtless gaiety lost no new idea that was started, 
nor any hint that could be improved. He had there- 
fore made in coffee-houses the same proficiency as 
others in their closets ; and it is remarkable, that the 
writings of a man of little education and little read- 
ing have an air of learning scarcely to be found in 



12 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

any other performances." Reinstate the Elizabethan 
taverns in place of the coffee-houses, and every word 
of this description is probably true of Shakespeare. 
If we may infer anything from his writings, we 
may be sure of this, that he had the art of giving 
himself wholly to his company, and accommodating 
himself to every new scene. This is a strong personal 
trait in him, though it does not help us to picture 
him as what is usually called a character. He pre- 
sents none of those angles and whimsicalities which 
lend themselves to caricature. Those of his contem- 
poraries who tried to parody his style generally 
fastened on the high strain of rhetoric which he 
assigns to such a character as Hotspur — 

By Heaven, metliinks it were an easy leap, 

To pluck bright honour from the pale-fac'd moon. 

It cannot be denied that Shakespeare had a great love 
of sumptuous rhetoric; he had also a very happy, 
humorous knack of contrasting it with reality. Here, 
as elsewhere, he is found on both sides. Sometimes he 
seems to be caught in the business and desire of the 
world, and to be inviting us to commit ourselves to 
a party. But he is not to be trusted; he will rise 
to his heights again, and look out on the battle from 
the mount of humour and contemplation. Some of 
the most living characters in his plays are those who 
prefer thus to look on life — Biron, Falstaff, Hamlet, 
Prospero. They have all, in one sense or another, 
failed at practical business ; but the width and truth 
of their vision is never impaired, and they are dear to 
Shakespeare. 

Shakespeare, then, was not a character in the narrow 
sense of that word, or in any sense which may be 
readily grasped by minds accustomed to shorthand 



I.] SHAKESPEARE 13 

expressions and ridiculous simplifications of the human 
problem. The study of him, in his habit as he lived, 
would have baffled those lovers of character who drew 
Sir Koger de Coverley, Parson Adams, and Colonel 
Newcome. Nevertheless, as we grow familiar with 
his work, we are overwhelmed by the sense that we 
are in the presence of a living man. When we read 
his comedies, we catch the infection of mirth that 
we know to be his. As we draw near to the awful 
close of King Lear or of Othello, and feel the fibres 
of our being almost torn asunder, the comfort that 
comes to us when quiet falls on the desolate scene 
is the comfort of the sure knowledge that Shake- 
speare is with us; that he who saw these things, 
felt them as we do, and found in the splendours 
of courage and love a remedy for despair. When he 
states both sides of a question, and seems to leave the 
balance wavering, he is still expressing his own mind, 
even by refusing the choice. Or, it may be, our 
understanding is too dull, and he counted on us rashly 
in leaving so much to our sympathy and intuition. 
But everywhere, even where we follow with uncertain 
steps, we feel the pressure of his hand, and are aware 
that all the knowledge that we gather by the way is 
knowledge of him, authorised and communicated by 
himself. 

What we learn from the poor remainder of contem- 
porary judgments is in perfect agreement, so far as it 
goes, with what the plays tell us. The epithets that 
are applied to Shakespeare and his work show a strong 
family likeness; he is called "ingenious," "mellifluous," 
" silver-tongued"; his industry is " happy and copious" ; 
he was " honest, and of an open and free nature " ; and 
always he is " the gentle Shakespeare." If we could 
make his living acquaintance, we should expect to find 



14 SHAKESPEAEE [chap. 

in him one of those well-balanced and plastic tempers 
which enable men to attract something less than their 
due share of observation and remark as they pass to 
and fro among their fellows. Children, we feel sure, 
did not stop their talk when he came near them, but 
continued, in the happy assurance that it was only 
Master Shakespeare. The tradition of geniality clings 
to his name like a faded perfume. Every one was more 
himself for being in the company of Shakespeare. 
This is not speculation, but truth : without such a gift 
he could not have come by his knowledge of mankind. 
Those lofty and severe tempers who, often to their 
own shame, make others feel abashed and shy, could 
by no possibility, even if they were dramatically 
minded, collect the materials of Shakespeare's drama. 
If, by a miracle, they could come up with the 
women and children, the rogues and vagabonds would 
evade them. Cordelia, because she was pitiful and 
generous, they might propitiate; but by no cunning 
could they come within earshot of the soliloquy of 
Autolycus. There is a kind of ingrained humility and 
lovableness in the character of those who are not 
righteous overmuch ; even a saint may miss it in the 
very act of taking pains ; but it was a part of the 
native endowment of Shakespeare, and a chief means 
of his proficiency in his craft. 

It need not be said that Shakespeare was a whole- 
hearted lover of pleasure, in himself and in others. 
His enormous zest in life makes his earlier comedies 
a paradise of delight. The love of pleasure, if it be 
generous, and sensitive, and quick to catch reflections, 
is hardly distinguishable from wisdom and tact. It 
has no respect for the self -torturing energies of a 
vengeful and brooding mind, or for those bitter 
thoughts which spend themselves in a vain agony 



I.] SHAKESPEARE 15 

upon tlie immutable past. Shakespeare's villains and 
evil characters are all self-absorbed and miserable and 
retrospective. They belong to the terrible army of 
cripples, who employ the best skill of their four senses 
to avenge upon others the loss of a fifth. Jealousy, 
born of deprivation, is a passion as common as mud ; 
to Shakespeare's thinking it is the core of all utter- 
most evil. Deprivation sweetly taken, with no thought 
of doubling the pain by invoking a wicked justice; 
love that does not alter when it finds alteration, but 
strengthens itself to make amends for the defect of 
others — these are the materials of the pinnacle whereon 
he raises his highest examples of human goodness. 
His own nature sought happiness as a plant turns to 
the light and air ; he pays his tribute of admiration 
to all who achieve happiness by ways however strange ; 
and his cult of happiness brought him his ultimate 
reward in that suffused glow of light reflected from 
the joy of a younger world, which illuminates his 
latest plays. 

If we find Shakespeare's character difficult to under- 
stand, we may take this much comfort, that here too 
Shakespeare is with us. His character was not all of 
a piece, neat and harmonious and symmetrical. The 
tragic conflicts which are the themes of his greatest 
plays were projected by him from the intestinal war- 
fare and insurrections of the kingdom of his mind. 
One such civil strife is pre-eminent among the rest, 
and has left its traces deep on his poetry. It is not 
the world-old struggle between reason and affection, 
between the counsels of passion and the cool dictates 
of prudence ; although that struggle is wonderfully 
illustrated in many of the plays, and an equal justice is 
done to both parties. But the central drama of his 
mind is the tragedy of the life of imagination. He 



16 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

was a lover of clear decisive action^ and of the deed 
done. He knew and condemned the sentiment which 
fondly nnrses itself and is without issue. Yet, on the 
other hand, the gift of imagination with which he was 
so richly dowered, the wide, restless, curious search- 
ings of the intelligence and the sympathies — these 
faculties, strong in him by nature, and strengthened 
every day by the exercise of his profession, bade fair 
at times to take sole possession, and to paralyse the 
will. Then he revolted against himself, and was al- 
most inclined to bless that dark, misfeatured messen- 
ger called the angel of this life, " whose care is lest 
men see too much at once." If for the outlook of a 
God the seer must neglect the opportunities and duties 
of a man, may not the price paid be too high ? It is 
a dilemma known to all poets, — to all men, indeed, 
who live the exhausting life of the imagination, and 
grapple hour by hour, in solitude and silence, with the 
creatures of their mind, while the passing invitations 
of humanity, which never recur, are ignored or re- 
pelled. Keats knew the position well, and has com- 
mented on it, though not tragically, in some passages 
of his letters. " Men of Genius," he says, " arc great 
as certain ethereal Chemicals operating on the Mass of 
neutral intellect — but they have not any individuality, 
any determined Character." And again : " A poet is 
the most unpoetical of anything in existence, because he 
has no Identity — he is continually in for and filling some 
other body." Keats also recognised, as well as Shake- 
speare, that man cannot escape the call to action, and 
it was he who said — "I am convinced more and more, 
every day, that fine writing is, next to fine doing, the 
top thing in the world." But what if this highest call 
come suddenly, as it always does, and find the man 
unnerved and unready, given over to " sensations and 



I.] SHAKESPEAEE 17 

day-niglitmares/' absorbed in speculation, out of him-" 
self, and unable to respond ? A famous English painter 
was once, at his own request, bound to the mast during 
a storm at sea, in order that he might study the pic- 
torial effects of sky and water. His help was not 
wanted in the working of the ship ; he was not one 
of the crew. Who among men, in the conduct of his 
own life, dare claim a like exemption ? 

Shakespeare certainly made no such claim ; but he 
knew the anguish of the divided mind, and had 
suffered from the tyranny of the imagination. It 
can hardly be said that he was over-balanced by his 
imaginative powers : they were all needed for his 
matchless achievement, and it was by their most 
potent aid that he won through, in the end, to peace 
and security. But no one can read his plays and not 
feel the fierce strain that they put upon him. His 
pictures of the men in whom imagination is predomi- 
nant — Eichard II., Hamlet, Macbeth — are among 
the most wonderful in his gallery, the most closely 
studied, and intimately realised. But not even the 
veil of drama can hide from us the admiration and 
devotion that he feels for those other men to whom 
action is easy — Hotspur, the bastard Faulconbridge, 
or, chief of all, Othello. These are the natural lords 
of human-kind. Shakespeare holds the balance steady : 
a measure of the subtle speculative power of Hamlet 
might have saved Othello from being made a murderer ; 
it could not have increased Shakespeare's love for 
him. 

The truth is that Shakespeare by revealing his whole 
mind to us, has given us just cause to complain that 
his mind is not small enough to be comprehended with 
ease. It is one of man's most settled habits, when he 
meets with anything that is new and strange, to be 



18 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

unhappy until he has named it, and, when he has 
named it, to be for ever at rest. Science is retarded 
not a little by the false sense of explanation that comes 
from the use of Greek and Latin names, which, when 
they are examined, prove to be nothing but laborious 
descriptions of the facts to be explained. The naming 
and re-naming of Shakespeare, which has gone on 
merrily for centuries under the care of sponsors good 
and evil, is more mischievous than this : the names 
given to him are not even fairly descriptive of a 
difficulty. They are labels impudently affixed to one 
aspect or another of his many-sided work. Books 
have been written to prove that he was an atheist; 
that he was a Roman Catholic; that he was an 
Anglican ; that he was a man deeply imbued with the 
traditions and sentiments of a Puritanic home — for, to 
the credit of human intelligence be it recorded, no one 
has yet said, in so many words, that he was a Puritan. 
Party government was not invented in his day; but 
much ink has been spent on the attempt to classify 
his political convictions, and to reduce them to a type. 
If those attempts had been successful, they would help 
us but little. A creed, religious or political, is the 
voice of a community rather than the expression of 
individual character : if Shakespeare were fitted with 
a creed, the personal differences which made him what 
he was would remain as dark as ever. Men are the 
dupes of their own games. There are writers on grave 
themes who cannot dispense with metaphors drawn 
from the cricket-field. There are historical and literary 
philosophers to whom Whig and Tory are the alpha 
and omega of criticism. Party names are exhilarating ; 
they mean a side taken, and a fight. But it is perhaps 
not unnatural that language invented for the practical 
needs of controversy should prove wholly inadequate 



I.] SHAKESPEARE 19 

to illuminate the shifting phases of the life of contem- 
plation. 

Shakespeare was that rarest of all things, a whole 
man. It is only warped and stunted partisans who 
are unable to see any virtue or truth on the other side. 
A Catholic who finds no force in the Protestant posi- 
tion, a Protestant who has never felt the fascination 
of the Catholic ideal, — these are not the best of their 
kind; and if all were like them, the strife of party 
would sink below the level of humanity. They are 
" damn'd, like an ill-roasted egg, all on one side." But 
even among those whose width of sympathy keeps life 
sweet, there are few indeed who dare court comparison 
with Shakespeare's utter freedom of thought. He will 
never buy favour and familiarity with one party at the 
price of neglecting or miscalling another. He loved 
the Court, and the country. He believed in authority, 
and in liberty. He could say, with Troilus — 

I am as true as truth's simplicity, 
And simpler than the infancy of truth ; 

and with Autolycus — 

How bless' d are we that are not simple men ! 

He was at one with Isabella, in Measure for Measure, 
when she gives utterance to the central truth of 
Christianity : 

Alas, alas : 
Why, all the souls that were, were forfeit once, 
And he that might the vantage best have took, 
Eound out the remedy ; 

and with Gloucester, in King Lear, when from the 
depths of his despair he impugns the mercy of 
Heaven : 

As flies to wanton boys are we to the Gods; 
They kill us for their sport. 



20 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

He is, in a word, a seer and a sceptic. There is no 
contradiction in all this. Large minds are open and 
wise, where small minds are close and cunning. Those 
who have never seen more than a little dare not ex- 
press all their doubts. The blind have infinite diffi- 
culty in determining what is visible ; and men of 
robust faith laugh loud and free, where half-believers 
are timid, and fearful lest they should stumble into 
blasphemy. We look in vain for reticences and parti- 
alities in Shakespeare, little devices of shelter and 
concealment ; he will not let us " nestle into a corner 
of his mind and think from there " 5 he keeps us out 
of doors, and we find the width of his vision fatiguing, 
the freedom of his movements bewildering. He is at 
home in the world ; and we complain that the place 
is too large for us, the visitation of the winds too 
rough and unceremonious. Perhaps we venture even 
to carp at the width of his outlook, — does it permit 
a man to attend to his own affairs, does it not wrap 
him in a humorous sadness, " compounded of many 
simples, extracted from many objects,^' and unfit him 
for the duty of the hour ? But Shakespeare's apology 
for his own life is more than sufficient. We know 
something of what he felt and thought, for he has 
told us. If we ask what he did, his answer admits 
of no human retort — he wrote his plays. 

The breadth and impartiality of Shakespeare's view of 
things has been recognised in that great commonplace of 
criticism which compares him with Nature. The critics 
say many and various things ; but they all say this. On 
the tablet under his bust in Stratford Church he is 
called " Shakespeare, with whom quick Nature died.'' 
Ben Jonson continues and enlarges the comparison : 

Nature herself was proud of his designs, 
And joy'd to wear the dressing of his lines. 



I.] SHAKESPEABE 21 

Milton celebrates Ms " native woodnotes wild." " He 
was the man," says Dry den, " who of all modern, and 
perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most com- 
prehensive soul. All the images of Nature were still 
present to him, and he drew them, not laboriously, 
but luckily ; when he describes anything, you more 
than see it, you feel it too. Those who accuse him 
to have wanted learning, give him the greater com- 
mendation : he was naturally learned ; he needed not 
the spectacles of books to read Nature ; he looked 
inwards, and found her there." So the figure is handed 
on, and is elaborated and heightened. It gives Pope 
his happiest sentence : " The Poetry of Shakespeare 
was Inspiration indeed : he is not so much an Imitator, 
a.s an Instrument, of Nature ; and 'tis not so just to 
say that he speaks from her, as that she speaks thro' 
him." Johnson repeats the same theme: "Shake- 
speare is above all writers, at least above all modern 
writers, the poet of nature ; the poet that holds up 
to his readers a faithful mirror of manners and of 
life." To these formal verdicts must be added all that 
wealth of meta^ohor which is spent on the effort to rise 
to the occasion : Shakespeare's irregularities, says Pope, 
are like the irregularities of " an ancient majestic piece 
of Gothic Architecture, compared with a neat Modern 
building " ; his work, says Johnson, differs from that 
of more correct writers as a forest differs from a 
garden ; his laugh, says Mr. Meredith, is " broad as 
ten thousand beeves at pasture." Nothing less than 
the visible world, in all its most various and imposing 
aspects, is accepted as a synonym for Shakespeare. 

In so far as these comparisons are directed to set- 
ting forth the catholicity and sanity of Shakespeare's 
genius, they are just and true. The identification 
of Shakespeare with Nature is, nevertheless, somewhat 



22 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

extravagant, and has made way for a host of fallacies. 
On a closer examination, it appears that no two of 
the critics mean the same thing by that Nature whom 
they invoke. Pope means originality ; and contrasts 
Shakespeare, drawing direct from the life, with 
Homer, whose art "came to him not without some 
tincture of the learning, or some cast of the models, 
of those before him." But what is here said of Homer 
has been proved, by later investigation, to be very 
exactly true of Shakespeare. Johnson intends modesty 
and probability ; Shakespeare has no heroes, only 
men ; he keeps love in its proper place as an agent 
in human affairs : his dialogue is level with life. What 
Milton was thinking of is not very certain ; he may 
be praising the spontaneity of the lyrics, or remember- 
ing the pastoral and woodland scenes of the comedies ; 
in either case he is far enough from Pope and Johnson. 
Lesser critics have drawn the comparison into a wild 
diversity of error. Some, like John Ward, Vicar of 
Stratford-upon-Avon, and unlike Ben Jonson, have 
judged Shakespeare to be "a natural wit, without 
any art at all." Others, whose name is legion, have 
held that since Shakespeare is Nature, the right way 
to study him is the way of the naturalist ; they have 
treated his work as if it were an encyclopaedia of 
information, and have parcelled it out in provinces, 
writing immeasurable books on Shakespeare's divinity, 
Shakespeare's heraldry, Shakespeare's law and medicine, 
Shakespeare's birds, beasts, fishes, and insects, — all 
tacitly proceeding on the strange assumption that it 
was a part of Shakespeare's purpose to impart an 
accurate knowledge of those branches of learning, 
and that by his success his true greatness may be 
judged. These are the entomologists of criticism: 
to the less learned populace the Nature simile has 



I.] SHAKESPEARE 23 

been an excuse for sheer lack of criticism ; they have 
persisted in their old, lazy, unimaginative habit of 
considering Shakespeare's men and women as the 
creatures of nature, rather than of dramatic art. Let 
us make an end of this, and do justice to Shakespeare 
the craftsman. The great hyperbole which confuses 
him with his Creator has served its original cere- 
monial purpose ; it is time to remember that the King 
is but a man, and that all his senses have but human 
conditions. 

One quality which has been attributed to Shake- 
speare in his character of Nature, and has been used 
to fortify the parallel, is certainly his by right. A 
very old and persistent tradition makes him the 
master of an incomparable ease and fluency. " His 
mind and hand went together,'^ say his friends and 
editors, Heminge and Condell, " and what he thought, 
he uttered with that easiness, that we have scarce 
received from him a blot in his papers." The credi- 
bility of these witnesses has been attacked, even their 
good faith has been questioned, but here, at least, is 
a statement which, in its main drift, every reader of 
Shakespeare feels to be true. Nor does it lack strong 
confirmation. '^ He had an excellent phantasy,'' 
says Ben Jonson, "brave notions and gentle expres- 
sions ; wherein he flowed with that facility, that 
sometime it was necessary he should be stopped." 
No one who has ever been caught in the torrent of 
Shakespeare's ideas and metaphors could mistake him 
for a slow, painful, and laborious writer. The frank 
geniality of the man and the excitable fervour of 
the talker are matched by the unchecked exuberance 
of the poet. Economy is no part of his habitual 
method. He does not waylay his meaning, and cap- 
ture it at a blow, but hunts it with a full cry 



24 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

of hounds, attended by a gay and motley company. 
His mind is rich, in ornaments, images, and after- 
thoughts. His style is full of incidents and surprises ; 
when he makes an end he has commonly told you 
far more than he set out to tell you. In his later 
plays he is more condensed, not by the chastening 
of his method, but by the crowded enrichment of his 
matter. Always the method is the same ; the phrase 
or sentence that does not quite do his business is 
retained in his service, and another is added to com- 
pete with it and overtake it ; wave follows wave and 
breaks short of the goalj until, at the ninth time of 
asking, the master-wave gathers the others into itself, 
and surrounds you and lifts you. When he becomes 
severe and bare, as he commonly does at the top of 
his tragic passion, it is not by the excision of super- 
fluities, but by the very intensity of the situation, 
which catches his eloquent fancy by the throat, and 
compels him to put his meaning into a few broken 
words. Let but the grip of facts be relaxed for a 
moment, his discursive imagination rouses itself again, 
and the full current of speech is resumed. In this 
way Shakespeare often gives a double expressiveness 
to a tragic crisis, and alternates dramatic silence with 
poetic eloquence. The high-strung whispered conver- 
sation of Macbeth with his wife, carried on in mono- 
syllables of question and reply, is followed at once by 
his great imaginative outburst on the murder of inno- 
cent sleep. The parting of Troilus and Cressida is 
first made beautiful by the poetic lament of Troilus : 

We two, that with so many thousand sighs 
Did buy each other, must poorly sell ourselves 
With the rude brevity and discharge of one. 
Injurious Time now with a robber's haste 
Crams his rich thievery up, he knows not how : 



I.] SHAKESFEAKE 25 

As many farewells as be stars in heaven, 

With distinct breath and consign'd kisses to them, 

He fumbles up into a loose adieu ; 

And scants us v/ith a single famish' d kiss, 

Distasting with the salt of broken tears. 

Then crude fact lias its turn, and the voice of Aeneas 
is heard calling — 

My Lord, is the Lady ready? 

It would be di£6.cult to name any moving situation in 
Shakespeare where he does not find or make an oppor- 
tunity to give a loose to his pen and to pour out some 
scantling at least of the riotous wealth of his imagina- 
tion. His ease is so great, that his wildest conceits 
hardly seem far-fetched. They throng about him like 
poor suitors proffering their services, and the magnifi- 
cence of his generosity finds them work to do. 

For an intimate knowledge of Shakespeare we are 
dependent chiefly on his book. Yet some facts of his 
life are recorded in extant documents, and some others 
may be accepted, without too great a risk, from tradi- 
tion and allusion. It is just possible that the store of 
facts concerning him may yet be increased. But it is 
not likely; now that antiquaries and scholars have 
toiled for generations, with an industry beyond all 
praise, in the search for lost memorials. These are 
the diligent workers among the ruins, who, when the 
fabric of our knowledge has crumbled to atoms, still 

As for seed of stars, stoop for the sand. 
And by incessant labour gather all. 

The enthusiasm which keeps them at work has been 
truly described by one of the chief of them, Mr. 
Halliwell-Phillipps. " No journey," he says, " is too 
long, no trouble too great, if there is a possibility of 



26 SHAKESPEAKE [chap. 

either resulting in the discovery of the minutest scrap 
of information respecting the life of our national poet.'^ 
By these ungrudging labours all that we are entitled 
to hope for has been achieved, and the Life of Shake- 
speare begins to assume the appearance of a scrap- 
heap of respectable size. Many, perhaps the majority, 
of the facts preserved have lost their connection and 
meaning, so that, unless we are willing to eke them 
out with a liberal fancy, they serve us not at all in 
our effort to portray the man. Another and a more 
valuable resource is left to us. We may study the 
human conditions which affected his life and work. 
The habits and customs, the ideas and tendencies of 
his own age, make a living background for him, and 
are everywhere reflected in his plays. These, in a 
certain sense, supplied him with his material ; and to 
these must be added the books that he read, the 
histories that he rifled for their information, and the 
poems and plays that he studied for their art. Even 
more important than the material of his art is the 
instrument, fashioned for him by others, and only 
slightly modified by himself. To become a popular 
playwright, which Shakespeare certainly was, a man 
must adapt his treatment of human life to the require- 
ments of the stage on which his plays are presented ; 
he must consult the abilities of the members of his 
company, and fit them with likely parts ; further — let 
it not be thought a disgrace to mention a condition 
which Shakespeare endeavoured, with zeal and success, 
to fulfil — he must study the tastes and expectations 
of his audience, and indulge them with what they 
approve. All this he must do, yet not forget the 
other. His own vision of poetic beauty and his own 
interpretation of human life are to be set forth under 
these rigid conditions and conventions. Here is the 



I.] SHAKESPEARE 27 

artist's opportunity : to observe the convention, as 
he observes the formalities of the sonnet, yet to 
make its very restraints a means of greater triumph, 
to subdue them and use them towards the accom- 
plishment of his own most serious meaning. In 
nothing is Shakespeare's greatness more apparent than 
in his concessions to the requirements of the Elizabethan 
theatre, concessions made sparingly and with an ill 
grace by some of his contemporaries, by him offered 
with both hands, yet transmuted in the giving, so that 
what might have been a mere connivance in baseness 
becomes a miracle of expressive art. The audience 
asked for bloodshed, and he gave them Hamlet. They 
asked for foolery, and he gave them King Lear. 

Lastly, to understand Shakespeare, it is necessary to 
study the subtlest of his instruments — the language 
that he wielded. Here the good progress made in 
recent times by the science of language is of little 
avail : most of the masters of that science are men 
who know all that can be known about language 
except the uses to which it is put. The methods of 
science are invaluable, and they will prove fruitful 
in the study of Shakespeare when they come to be 
applied by those who understand how poetry is made, 
and who join the end to the beginning. Without a 
knowledge of common Elizabethan usages, colloquial 
and literary, it is impossible to give Shakespeare the due 
share of credit for his handling of his native speech. 
His amazing wealth of vocabulary and idiom, his 
coinages and violent distortions of meaning, his free- 
doms of syntax and analogy, comparable only to the 
freedoms that are habitual in the "little language'^ 
of a family of children, — all these things must be 
assessed, and compared with the normal standards of 
his time, before they can be known for a part of him. 



28 SHAKESPEARE [chap. i. 

The dogmatic grammarians, a race not yet wholly 
extinct, make rules for language as Aristotle made 
rules for the epic poem, and impose their chill models 
on submissive decadence. Much of Shakespeare's 
language is language hot from the mind, and only 
partially hardened into grammar. It cannot be judged 
save by those whose ease of apprehension goes some 
way to meet his ease of expression. 

Here, then, is matter enough and to spare. A brief 
essay cannot hope to achieve much. ^Tis too late to 
be ambitious. Among the topics, old and new, which 
are fit for treatment, a selection must be made, and 
of those selected none can be exhaustively handled. 
What is chosen shall be chosen with a single aim in 
view : the mind of Shakespeare is to be seen at work ; 
and to that end the raw material of his craft, and the 
nature of the tools that he employed, must be con- 
sidered in the closest possible connection with that 
marvellous body of poetry which, by its vitality and 
beauty, has cast some shadow of disesteem on the 
forgotten processes of its making. 



CHAPTER II 

STRATFORD AND LONDON 

William Shakespeare came of a family of yeomen in 
the county of Warwick. The name was a common one 
in many parts of England, and during the sixteenth 
century occurs in some twenty-four places of that 
county alone. There were several William Shake- 
speares. One was drowned in the Avon and buried 
at Warwick in 1579. Another, some forty years 
later, w^as a small farmer's agent ; and perhaps it was 
he, not the creator of Shylock, who in 1604 sued 
Philip Eogers for £1, 15s. lOd., the price of malt 
supplied. A third, the son of John Shakespeare, 
Chamberlain of the borough, was baptized at Stratford 
on the 26th of April 1564, and lived to be the author 
of the plays. 

It seems probable that Shakespeare's grandfather 
was one Richard Shakespeare, a small farmer at 
Snitterfield, and a tenant of the Ardens of Wilmecote. 
Of this Richard we know nothing to the purpose ; he 
is a name and a shadow, flitting through the records 
of the time. John Shakespeare, the poet's father, is 
the first of the stock whom it is possible to draw in 
outline, and to conceive as a character. He came to 
Stratford not later than 1552, and there traded in 
farm-produce as glover, dealer in wool, and butcher. 
The diversity of the trades assigned to him need cause 
no incredulity; such a combination was possible 

29 



30 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

enough in a town surrounded by pasture-land, and 
seems to testify to his restless enterprise in business. 
He prospered rapidly, was successful in small law- 
suits, acquired property, married an heiress, and was 
advanced to high office, becoming, in a short series of 
years, ale-taster, constable, affeeror, chamberlain, alder- 
man ; lastly, when his son William was four years old, 
he attained the summit of his municipal ambition, and 
appears as Justice of the Peace and High Bailiff of the 
Town. Then his affairs declined ; he who was wont 
to be plaintiff and triumphant creditor assumes the 
more melancholy character of defendant and insolvent 
debtor ; he mortgages his wife's estate, absents him- 
self from the meetings of the Town Council, is deprived 
of his alderman's gown, ceases to attend church and 
is presented as a recusant ; but continues, as he began, 
incurably litigious. During his later years we hear no 
more of financial difficulties, and it has been reasonably 
assumed that the success of his son restored the family 
fortunes. At the close of the century he succeeded, 
after repeated applications, in obtaining the grant of 
a coat-of-arms ; in 1601 he died, and was buried at 
Stratford. The bare facts, so far as they lend them- 
selves to portraiture, seem to supply suggestions for 
the picture of an energetic, pragmatic, sanguine, frothy 
man, who was always restlessly scheming and could 
not make good his gains. " He spread his bread with 
all sorts of butter, yet none would stick thereon." We 
guess him to have been of a mercurial temperament, 
and are not surprised to find that he was a lover of 
dramatic shows. During his tenure of the office of 
High Bailiff, wandering companies of players make 
their first recorded appearance at Stratford, and per- 
form before the Town Council, receiving money for 
their pains. In business he seems to have been 



11.] STRATFORD AND LONDON 31 

fervent, unsteady, and irrepressible ; in speech he may- 
well have been excitable, sententious, and dogmatic. 
It is worthy of notice that Shakespeare, in his earlier 
plays, shows but scant regard for the wisdom of the 
older generation. In Romeo and Juliet and The Taming 
of the Shreio the seniors are troublesome stage-fathers, 
impertinent, dull-witted, talkative, moral, and asinine. 
The speculation is impious, but stranger things are 
true, and if the father of Charles Dickens lent his 
likeness to Mr. Micawber, it is at least possible that 
some not unkindly memories of the paternal advices of 
John Shakespeare have been preserved for us in the 
sage maxims of Polonius. Some fathers of famous 
writers we feel to have been better men than their 
sons, saner, more modest, and preserved from fame not 
by their lack of vigour, but by their hatred of excess. 
Such was the father of Thomas Carlyle. Others by 
their very extravagances have helped to school their 
sons into sanity and wisdom; the fervour of their 
temper has passed on undiminished, but their mis- 
carriages leave much work to do, and their failings 
teach self-criticism to those who succeed them. Such, 
perhaps, was the father of William Shakespeare. 

His mother, Mary Arden, was a small heiress, and 
what is more important, seems to have been of gentle 
birth. " By the spindle-side," says that excellent 
antiquary, Mrs. Stopes, "his pedigree can be traced 
straight back to Guy of AYarwick and the good King 
Alfred. There is something in fallen fortune that 
lends a subtler romance to the consciousness of a 
noble ancestry, and we may be sure this played no 
small part in the making of the poet." And this is 
not all. Shakespeare was "to the manner born." 
From the very first he has an unerringly sure touch 
with the character of his high-born ladies ; he knows 



32 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

all that can neither be learned by method nor taught 
in words, — the unwritten code of delicate honour, the 
rapidity and conlidence of decision, the quickness of 
sympathy, the absolute trust in instinct, and the un- 
hesitating freedom of speech. 

In Shakespeare's day the forest of Arden, stretching 
away to the north of the river, was more than a 
name ; and much of his boyhood was spent in that 
best of schools, a wild and various country. At the 
G-rammar School he would learn Latin, and make 
acquaintance with those numerous games which re- 
ceive honourable mention in the plays. Doubtless, 
like Falstaff, he "pluckt geese, played truant, and 
whipt top," and "knew what 'twas to be beaten." 
Children's games are eternal : Hoodman-blind, Barley- 
break, All hid. Dun's in the mire, — these vary from 
age to age in nothing but the name, and though they 
afford a natural outlet for activity, they are seldom 
the landmarks of a travelling soul. Adventures by 
field and forest, on the other hand, may very easily 
become dates in the life of a poet. Shakespeare must 
have wandered for whole days and nights about the 
countryside, and was delicately sensitive to all the 
shifting aspects of the pageant of Nature, to Spring 
and Autumn, dawn and sunset, wind and cloud. His 
plays abound in passages which bear all the marks of 
detailed reminiscence. In A Midsummer JSfighf s Dream^ 
Titania describes a summer of tempest and flood 
which has drowned the low-lying lands near the 
river : 

The ox hath therefore stretch'd his yoke in vain, 
The ploughman lost his sweat, and the green corn 
Hath rotted, ere his youth attain' d a beard ; 
The fold stands empty in the drowned field ; 
The crows are fatted with the murrion flock ; 



II.] STRATFORD AND LONDON 33 

The Nine men's morris is fill'd up with mud, 
And the quaint mazes in the wanton green 
For lack of tread are undistinguishahle. 

Puck, in the same play, illustrates the flight of the 
panic-stricken rustics, when they behold their trans- 
figured chief, by a familiar incident of the Stratford 
fields : 

As wild-geese, that the creeping fowler eye, 
Or russet-pated choughs, many in sort, 
Rising and cawing at the gun's report, 
Sever themselves, and madly sweep the sky, 
So at his sight away his fellows fly. 

But the deep impression made on Shakespeare by his 
early memories of Stratford may be best seen in pass- 
ages where they are associated with the moods and 
fancies of his own mind. To a poet, Nature is not a 
collection of things, but an influence, a reflection, 
a counterpart to the drama of his soul. Now it is 
the course of true love that suggests the flow of quiet 
midland streams : 

The current that with gentle murmur glides 

Thou know'st being stop'd, impatiently doth rage ; 

But when his fair course is not hindered, 

He makes sweet music with th' enamel'd stones, 

Giving a gentle kiss to every sedge 

He overtaketh in his pilgrimage. 

Or, again, he remembers 

the pleached bower, 
Where honey-suckles ripened by the sun 
Forbid the sun to enter ; 

and his mind wanders off to the ingratitude of princes' 
favourites. His memories of Nature, of "the uncer- 
tain glory of an April day," of the sun " gilding pale 
streams with heavenly alchemy," of the ugly rack of 
p 



34 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

clouds that steal across his face, of the " canker in the 
fragrant rose," and of the ruin of autumn, 

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang 
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, 

— all these things are utterly unlike the laborious 
notes of a descriptive writer ; they have put on im- 
mortality in metaphor, and come readily to hand 
because they are a part of his own life, and have been 
taught to speak the language of his own thought. 

To a lover of human drama, the moving incidents of 
life in the country, and the excitements of sport and 
the chase, must have been full of interest. There can 
be no doubt that Shakespeare was minutely acquainted 
with all the lore of field-sports, — the hunt of the 
hare and the stag, and the capture of smaller game 
by the falcon. His knowledge of these things, as Mr. 
Vice-Chancellor Madden has shown, would have done 
credit to an old huntsman. It is true that here also 
he uses his knowledge by way of illustration, and so 
seems to appeal to an audience well versed in the 
terms of sport. Even Juliet is perfectly accomplished 
in the tongue : 

Hist, Romeo, hist ! O for a falconer's voice 
To lure this tassel-gentle back again ! 

In her beautiful invocation to Night, the quick flushing 
of her cheeks, as she waits for the sun to set, suggests. 
a whole parable of hawking, and of taming, or " man- 
ning" wild hawks, as they "bate," or flutter on the 
perch, by the use of a velvet hood : 

Hood my unmann'd blood, bating in my cheeks. 
With thy black mantle ; till strange love, grown bold. 
Think true love acted simple modesty. 

There is no play of Shakespeare's without some of 



II.] STRATFORD AND LONDON 35 

these allusions, and he is as familiar with the points 
of a horse and the kinds and qualities of hounds and 
deer as with the forgotten science of falconry. But it 
would seem that some part, at least, of his knowledge 
is the knowledge of an onlooker rather than a hunts- 
man. He is true here to his own wide sympathy, and 
cannot forget the quarry in the chase, — true also, per- 
haps, to his earliest memories. Two of his most won- 
derful pictures are, first, the description, in As You Like 
It, of the anguish of the sequestered stag, wounded by 
the hunters ; and, yet more vivid, the picture drawn in 
Venus and Adonis of poor Wat, the hare, standing erect, 
in a passion of apprehension, listening for the distant 
cry of the hounds : 

Then shalt thou see the dew-bedabbled wretch 
Turn, and return, indenting with the way ; 
Each envious briar his weary legs doth scratch, 
Each shadow makes him stop, each murmur stay : 
Eor misery is trodden on by many. 
And being low, never reliev'd by any. 

Is not this a description of the hunt as it might be 
seen by a boy playing truant from school, and choosing 
a brake near a hill-top as a vantage-ground for observa- 
tion and concealment ? 

As for Natural History in the modern sense, Shake- 
speare knew little about it, and cared even less. The 
social life of the humbler creatures did not engage 
his attention. It has been truly said that he w^as 
" curiously unobservant of animated Nature." The 
habits of birds and beasts and fishes seem to come 
immediately under his eye only when they touch the 
daily interests of average humanity. When he wants 
an illustration from animal life for the figurative ex- 
position of his thought, he is content, as often as not, 
to make use of the commodious lies of picturesque 



36 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

tradition. The toad that wears a precious jewel in his 
head, the unicorn that is betrayed with trees, the 
basilisk that kills at sight, the bear-whelp that is 
licked into shape by its mother, the pelican that feeds 
her young with her own blood, the phoenix of Arabia, 
the serpent of Egypt, and the Hyrcan tiger, — all these 
he accepts without question for the decoration of his 
style. When he deals with creatures nearer home he 
follows the same plan, and adopts all those popular 
prejudices which have embedded themselves in the 
phrases of daily speech. " Dog " — except when the 
dog helps in the chase — he commonly uses as a term 
of vituperation. Cats are "creatures we count not 
worth the hanging." In these usages he is merely 
taking words as he finds them, and refusing to im- 
poverish the language of abuse by a forlorn protest 
on behalf of the goose, the ass, the ape, the dog, or 
the cat. When Launce's dog. Crab, makes his bodily 
appearance on the stage, in The Two Gentlemen of 
Verona, these ancient prejudices are discarded, and the 
dog is admitted to fellowship with man. But the 
wild creatures of the fields and the woods, because 
they have never run the risk of familiarity with 
slanderous man, are for the most part outside this 
argument of rhetorical usage ; and are outside the 
circle of Shakespeare's sympathetic observation. The 
encyclopaedic and naturalist critics have made plentiful 
assertions to the contrary ; Dr. Brandes, accepting the 
myth, has praised Shakespeare for his " astonishing 
store of natural knowledge," and his inexhaustible 
familiarity with the habits of animals and birdL. 
The following are the examples invoked for proof : 
Shakespeare knew that the greyhound's mouth 
catches ; that pigeons feed their young ; that her- 
rings are bigger than pilchards ; that trout are caught 



II.] STRATFORD AND LONDON 37 

with tickling; that the lapwing runs close to the 
ground ; that the cuckoo lays its eggs in the nests 
of other birds ; that the lark resembles the bunting. 
Many a city-bred boy knows all this and more. And 
these statements are cited because, in the main, they 
are true. Shakespeare's errors would make a longer 
tale. His nightingale and his cuckoo are creatures 
falsified out of all knowledge by the accumulated fables 
of tradition. The famous passage on the bees, in 
Henry V., is glittering poetry ; but " as a description 
of a hive," says a critic of knowledge and parts, "it 
is utter nonsense, with an error of fact in every other 
line, and instinct throughout with a total misconcep- 
tion of the great bee-parable." Virgil knew something 
of the bee ; Shakespeare little or nothing. 

Let this sufi&ce : it would be a tedious task to at- 
tempt to demolish all the foolish piles that have been 
erected with intent to honour the poet. Shakespeare 
was a master of language, and a profound student 
of the human mind. His comparative ignorance of 
Natural History does him no discredit. There is a 
story of Canning, which John Hookham Frere told 
one day to his nephew. "I remember," he said, 
" going to consult Canning on a matter of great 
importance to me, when he was staying down near 
Enfield. We walked into the woods to have a quiet 
talk, and as we passed some ponds I was surprised 
to find it was a new light to him that tadpoles 
turned into frogs. Now," said the teller of the 
tale, " don't you go and repeat that story of Canning 
to the next fool yov meet. Canning could rule, and 
did rule, a great and civilised nation ; but in these 
days people are apt to fancy that any one who does 
not know the natural history of frogs must be an im- 
becile in the treatment of men." 



S8 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

If Shakespeare made no minute study of the cat, 
the nightingale, and the bee, he had the quickest eye 
for the habits of the vagrant, the watchman of a town, 
and the schoolmaster. He has left us a very realistic 
picture of an Elizabethan Latin-lesson in that scene 
of Tlie Merry Wives where Sir Hugh Evans examines 
little William on his knowledge of Lilly's Grammar. 
The three head-masters who reigned at Stratford from 
1570 to 1580 were Walter Eoche, Thomas Hunt, and 
Thomas Jenkins ; and Sir Hugh Evans may perhaps 
bear some resemblance to the last of these. The more 
elaborately drawn and pedantic Holofernes, in Lovers 
Labour's Lost, and Pinch, schoolmaster and conjurer, 
in The Comedy of Errors, occurring, as they do, in very 
early plays, probably owe some hints to the school- 
master whom Shakespeare knew best, and may thus 
preserve for us a savour of the ideas and apprehen- 
sions " begot in the ventricle of memory, and delivered 
upon the mellowing of occasion " by Master Thomas 
Hunt. Holofernes is the complete academic gram- 
marian. But the extreme gauntness of his visage, so 
boisterously ridiculed by the courtiers, is only one of 
many indications that Shakespeare had a lean actor in 
his early company. 

At the Grammar School much time was " bestowed 
on the tongues," and there is no reason to reduce 
Shakespeare's " small Latin " to the mere repetition 
of a grammar. A working knowledge of the Latin 
language was commoner in that age than in this, and 
it is certain that he could read Latin when he was 
so minded. The ordinary school course would take a 
boy, by the time he was fourteen years of age, through 
parts at least of Ovid, Virgil, Horace, Juvenal, Plautus, 
Seneca, and Cicero, besides introducing him to the 
elements of Grammar, Logic, and Ehetoric. Yet, for 



II,] STRATFORD AND LONDON 39 

all that, Shakespeare was no Latin scholar, and in his 
maturer years we find him using a translation, where- 
ever there \vas one to be had, in preference to the 
original. The most popular Latin author of his age 
was Ovid ; and he certainly knew Ovid, for he quotes 
him in the original more than once, and chooses a 
motto for Venus and Adonis from the Elegies. But 
his more elaborate borrowings from Ovid come, for 
the most part, by way of Arthur Golding's translations 
in doggerel verse. He studied the classics, that is to 
say, not chiefly for their form, but for their matter ; 
Ovid he valued as a story-teller who revealed a new 
and enchanting world of fable and imagination. It is 
possible, but not likely, that he had a smattering of 
Greek ; if he had, it was so little as to make the ques- 
tion hardly worth a minute investigation. The formal 
study of Logic and Rhetoric left a deeper impression on 
his mind, and gave him keen delight. Lovers Labour^ s 
Lost is a carnival of pedantry; and just as a good 
clown must needs be a good acrobat, so he who shows 
such skill in deriding these gymnastics of the intellect 
proves himself to have been carefully exercised in 
them. To the end of his life Shakespeare never uses 
the mechanical processes of Logic and Ehetoric without 
lending them a touch of delightful absurdity. His 
syllogisms and classifications, his figures and distinc- 
tions, his formal devices whereby set propositions are 
amplified and confirmed — all bear witness to his 
studies. 

He hath prosperous art 
When he will play with reason and discourse. 

His very " argal " prepares us for laughter. He riots 
in the multiplication of processes to attain a simple 
end, and, while comedy is his business, will never 



40 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

refuse to climb o'er the house to unlock the little gate. 
" It is a figure in Khetoric," says Touchstone, " that 
drink, being pour'd out of a cup into a glass, by filling 
the one doth empty the other." Beyond these voices 
of pedants and jesters we hear the verdict of the 
dramatist, and the conclusion of the whole matter, 
uttered in a single sentence : 

Learning is but an adjunct to ourself . 

If he learned little Latin at school, it is the more to 
be regretted ; he certainly learned little else. For a 
knowledge of modern history he was dependent on 
his own reading, on conversation, and tradition. He 
would hear much, though hardly in open discussion, 
of the Protestant Reformation and the religious 
troubles. These were things to be spoken of warily : 
as for writing — " Whosoever," says Sir Walter E-aleigh, 
^^in writing a modern History, shall follow truth too 
near the heels, it may haply strike out his teeth." 
Among those earlier events which had already, in the 
time of his childhood, passed outside the heat of con- 
troversy, the Wars of the Roses loomed incomparably 
the largest, and appealed most to the popular imagina- 
tion. That great civil strife was no further removed 
in time from the boyhood of Shakespeare than is the 
battle of Trafalgar from the children of to-day ; and 
the force of tradition was then far more potent than 
it can ever be in an age of primers. It was still the 
fashion, in winter's tedious nights, to sit by the fire 
with good old folks, and listen to their tales 

Of woful ages long ago betid. 

The rivalry of the houses of York and Lancaster 
had been the destroyer of mediaeval England and 
the creator and upholder of the Tudor monarchy, 



II.] STRATFORD AND LONDON 41 

which was founded on the memory of those inter- 
necine horrors, and was strengthened by the fear 
of their recurrence. To prevent another disputed 
succession England was willing to go all lengths, 
even to the bringing in of the Stuart dynasty. Shake- 
speare's great historical epic shows a familiarity with 
the struggle in all its phases such as can hardly 
have been acquired solely from books. This was the 
school where he learned his politics; by this light 
he read Eoman history, and interpreted the feuds of 
Italian cities. The moral, which he is never tired 
of repeating, is the moral of the chronicler Hall; 
the English historical plays are written " so that all 
men, more clearer than the sun, may apparently 
perceive that as by discord great things decay and 
fall to ruin, so the same by concord be revived and 
erected.'' The Bastard Eaulconbridge, in his triumph- 
ant peroration at the close of King John, speaks to 
the same effect ; and the wof ul prophecy in Richard IL, 
spoken b}^ the Bishop of Carlisle at the very beginning 
of the long strife, is in reality a retrospect of the 
miseries that were not yet faded from the memory or 
forgotten in the daily talk of children's children. 

Old tradition and the inherent probabilities of the 
case agree in withdrawing Shakespeare from school 
at a comparatively early age. What employment 
he followed when he left school we cannot certainly 
know. Aubrey reports, on good authority, that he 
had been " in his younger years a schoolmaster in the 
country." There is nothing conclusive to be said against 
this; and nothing to object to Aubrey's other state- 
ment that "when he was a boy, he exercised his 
father's trade, but when he killed a calf, he would do 
it in a high style, and make a speech." Imaginative 
children are wont to decorate many a less worthy 



42 SHAKESPEARE [cHAi*. 

occasion with play-acting. We need not suppose that 
he found employ in a lawyer's office. He certainly 
has a remarkable knowledge of the processes and 
technicalities of the law: he was not the eldest son 
of his father for nothing. It seems almost certain, 
at least, that these years were passed in his native 
place, and that 

While other men of slender reputation 
Put forth their sons to seek preferment out : 
Some to the wars, to try their fortune there; 
Some to discover islands far away ; 
Some to the studious Universities ; 

the son of John Shakespeare was still, perhaps 
against his inclination, a home-keeping youth. But 
the spirit of adventure is not to be denied. We 
are the sons of women; we cannot cross the cause 
why we are born. It would be difficult to conceive 
of Shakespeare as resting content with the beaten 
round, and rejecting all the enticements of young 
blood. "I would there were no age between ten 
and three-and-twenty/' says the Shepherd in The 
Winter^ s Tale, "or that youth would sleep out the 
rest ; for there is nothing, in the between, but getting 
wenches with child, wronging the Ancientry, stealing, 
fighting." When next we hear of Shakespeare, in 
1582, he is to be married, not without circumstances 
of irregularity and haste, to Anne Hathaway, a woman 
some eight years his senior ; six months thereafter 
his eldest child, Susanna, is born ; in 1585 the twins, 
Hamnet and Judith, are added to his family; about 
the same time, or not much later, he is involved in 
serious trouble with Sir Thomas Lucy, the chief land- 
owner of the place, and leaves Stratford for London, 
there to seek his fortune. When he comes into notice 



II.] STRATFORD AND LONDON 43 

again, in 1592, the playwrights of the London stage are 
already beginning to find him a formidable rival. 

The early traditions are agreed in attributing the 
departure from Stratford to a poaching affray and its 
consequences. He was " much given," says one early 
collector of gossip, "to all unluckiness in stealing 
venison and rabbits." Eowe, in his Account of the 
Life &c. of 3Ir. William ShaJcespear (1709), gives a 
fuller version of the story. Shakespeare joined with 
some companions in robbing a park that belonged 
to Sir Thomas Lucy ; for this he was prosecuted, and 
retorted in lampoons with such effect that the prose- 
cution was redoubled, and he was driven from his 
home. All this is perfectly credible ; the evidence 
that remains to us is unanimous in its favour ; the 
allusions in the plays bear it out ; and there is no solid 
argument against it. Yet some antiquaries of the 
nineteenth ceiitury have felt free to reject it, and to 
substitute for it an account of how things must have 
happened. If we follow them here, we must reject 
the whole body of tradition ; and it is worth remark- 
ing that the Shakespeare traditions which have come 
down to us are, in the main, good traditions. They 
are not tainted in origin, and were not collected or 
published by any one who had a case to prove. Most 
of them derive from one or other of two sources : the 
commonplaces of local gossip at Stratford, or the 
stories remembered and repeated by those who had to 
do with the theatre. Shakespeare in his later years 
was a well-known man at Stratford; his daughters 
passed their lives there, Susanna dying in 1649 and 
Judith in 1662 ; and when Betterton made a pilgrimage 
to the place in order to collect the materials which 
were subsequently used by Rowe, there must have 
been many old inhabitants who had known them well. 



44 SHAKESPEAEE [chap. 

A certain John Dowdall talked at Stratford, in the 
year 1693, with an old parish clerk who was born 
some years before Shakespeare died, and who told him 
" that this Shakespeare was formerly in this town 
bound apprentice to a butcher, but that he ran from 
his master to London, and there w^as received into the 
play-house as a servitor, and by this means had an 
opportunity to be what he afterwards proved. He 
was the best of his family." The tales told to Aubrey 
by the aged William Beeston, who belonged to an old- 
established family of play-actors, and the notes made, 
not later than 1663, by the Eev. John Ward, Vicar of 
Stratford, are no less deserving of belief ; and if all 
these accounts be compared, they display no serious 
inconsistencies. It is the very vanity of scepticism to 
set all these aside in favour of a tissue of learned 
fancies. 

The stage-tradition was no doubt grievously inter- 
rupted by the closing of the theatres and the dispersal 
of the actors under the Long Parliament. Yet though 
many of the actors died fighting for the King, some few 
survived to play a part on the Kestoration stage ; and 
Sir William Davenant, who in his boyhood had known 
Shakespeare, and in his early manhood had been inti- 
mate with Shakespeare's friends and fellows, carried 
on the unbroken line of theatrical tradition. When 
interest in the life of Shakespeare was first awakened, 
towards the close of the seventeenth century, there was 
no lay-figure of the dramatist, to which the facts must 
needs be fitted, and none of that regard for his supposed 
dignity, which has been allowed, in this half-educated 
age of critical theory, to distort the outlines of a plain 
tale. 

Some pieces of information with regard to the plays 
come to us casually from these same traditional sources. 



II.] STRATFORD AND LONDON 45 

It is from Dryden we learn that " Shakespeare showed 
the best of his skill in his Mercutio ; and he said him- 
self that he was forced to kill him in the Third Act, to 
prevent being killed by him." It is by Dennis we are 
told that Tlie Merry Wives of Windsor was written in 
fourteen days at the command of Queen Elizabeth, 
who desired to see Falstaff in love. These are welcome 
additions to our scanty store, and they fit in with what 
we know. 

In London Shakespeare is said to have found " mean 
employment " : a late and not flawless tradition gives 
him work as a holder of horses at the doors of the 
suburban theatres. He must have rapidly gained a 
footing within the theatre, so that his first steps to 
fortune are of the less account. Goldsmith, who hardly 
ever mentioned his own early struggles, once made a 
passing allusion to the days when he lived among the 
beggars in Axe Lane. Those days were days fruitful 
to him in experience : and Shakespeare's early years 
in London must have been alive with novelty and 
excitement, yielding him the richest part of his harvest 
of observation. The city was small, and not much 
unlike what it had been in Chaucer's day. Its main 
highway of traffic was still to be found where 

clear and sweet and strong, 
Thames' stream, scarce fettered, bore the bream along 
Unto the bastioned bridge, its only chain. 

The walls held the city compact ; to the fields immedi- 
ately beyond them the people resorted for pastime, or 
crossed the river to Southwark, there to see bear- 
baiting and fencing. Artillery practice was carried 
on in a field enclosed with a brick wall in Bishopsgate 
Without. In these same liberties, outside the jurisdic- 
tion of the Corporation, two theatres, at least, had 



46 SHAKESPEAEE [chap. 

already been erected. Within the walls, though the 
open fields surrounded them, a motley and crowded 
population struggled and surged. Cheapside was as 
full of life and noise as it is to-day, and fuller 
of diversity of colour and costume. In this city 
Shakespeare passed his dramatic apprenticeship, ever 
hungry to see and to hear, learning his craft, making 
acquaintance, as he began to feel his feet under him, 
with the life of the town, comparing notes, it may 
be, with fellow-poets and fellow-adventurers whose 
names have long since sunk into oblivion, working at 
the odd jobs given him by the theatrical companies, 
dining at the ordinary of the taverns, gazing on 
courtly processions and spectacles, seeing new types 
of character and hearing new stories day by day. In 
the life of every artist there are certain golden years 
when the soul is pliable, years of exultant discovery 
and unfailing response to new impressions. Later in 
life, when self-assurance and stability have come with 
success, a man may keep all his energy, and may 
better his craftsmanship, or middle age would be a 
tedious mockery; but the magic of freshness and 
adventure is gone beyond recall. During these crucial 
years, when the world flows in upon the mind, Shake- 
speare's takings were enormous at Stratford and in 
London. We cannot trace the history of his experi- 
ence ; and Elizabethan society is known to us chiefly 
through his works, so that we are at a disadvantage 
if we try to check the picture by the original. In his 
plays he took a story from anywhere, and gave his 
characters Italian or French or Roman names. But 
for realism and vitality he was dependent on his 
observation of the life around him. Anachronism 
was nothing to him ; verisimilitude everything. He 
did not travel to collect "local colour.'' One house- 



II.] STRATFOIID AND LONDON 47 

hold is enough, says Juvenal, for him who wishes to 
study the habits of the human race ; and Shakespeare 
was satisfied with the household of his own people. 
There are clocks in Julius Coesar ; a paper-mill and 
printing in Henry VI. ; Italian fashions in Cymheline ; 
indeed, except in the Eoman plays, Shakespeare takes 
leave to fill in all the movement and detail of the play 
from his own world. 

A few illustrations will serve to show how the in- 
cidents and characters of his plays were gathered 
from the life around him. Harrison, in the Descrip- 
tion of England added to Holin shed's Chronicles, gives 
an exact account of the usual method of highway 
robberies. " Seldom," he says, " are any wayfaring 
men robbed without the consent of the chamberlain, 
tapster, or ostler where they bait and lie, who, feeling 
at their alighting whether their capcases or budgets 
be of any weight or not, do by-and-by give intimation 
to some one or other attendant daily in the yard or 
house, or dwelling hard by, whether the prey be worth 
the following or no. If it be for their turn, then the 
gentleman peradventure is asked which way he trav- 
elleth, and whether it please him to have another 
guest to bear him company at supper, who rideth 
the same way in the morning that he doth, or not. 
And thus if he admit him, or be glad of his acquaint- 
ance, the cheat is half wrought, . . . And these are 
some of the policies of such shrews or close-booted 
gentlemen as lie in wait for fat booties by the high- 
ways, and which are most commonly practised in the 
winter season, about the feast of Christmas, when 
serving-men and unthrifty gentlemen want money to 
play at the dice and cards." This was the method 
of the famous robbery in Henry IV. In the dark 
inn-yard at Eochester, Gadshill is found in earnest 



48 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

conversation with the chamberlain of the inn, who 
tells him of the Kentish franklin and his three 
hundred marks in gold ; while the unthrifty gentle- 
men (one of whom is fat, and grows old) lie in wait 
by the roadside till news is brought them by their 
faithful "setter.'' 

In another passage of his book Harrison describes 
the dealings of persons of fashion with their tailor. 
" How curious, how nice also, are a number of men 
and women, and how hardly can the tailor please them 
in making it fit for their bodies ! How many times 
must it be sent back again to him that made it ! What 
chafing, what fretting, what reproachful language, doth 
the poor workman bear away ! " Such was the fact 
as it was observed by William Harrison, — as it was 
observed also by William Shakespeare, and imagina- 
tively presented, with all colloquial vivacity, in the 
scene between Petruchio and the tailor. 

The character of Dogberry, says Aubrey, was 
studied from a live original. "The humour of the 
constable in a Midsummer's Mght's Dream " (Aubrey 
was no sure guide among the plays) " he happened 
to take at Grendon in Bucks, which is the road from 
London to Stratford, and there was living that con- 
stable about 1642, when I first came to Oxon." How- 
ever this may be, that constable was living in many 
another place, and was adorned, not created, by 
Shakespeare's imagination. There is extant a letter, 
dated 1586, from Lord Burghley to Sir Francis 
Walsingham, complaining of the absurd behaviour 
of the persons appointed to arrest the conspirators 
in Babington's plot. Burghley tells how he was 
travelling from London to Theobalds in his coach, 
and noticed at every town's end some ten or twelve 
men standing conspicuously, in groups, armed with 



II.] STRATEORD AND LONDON 49 

long staves. They stood under penthouses, and he 
conceived them to be avoiding the rain, or waiting 
to drink at an alehouse. But coming upon a dozen 
at Enfield, where there was no rain, it occurred to 
him that these were the watchmen appointed to 
waylay and arrest the conspirators against the life 
of the Queen. " Thereupon,'^ he says, " I called some 
of them to me apart, and asked them wherefore they 
stood there. And one of them answered, 'To take 
three young men.' And demanding how they should 
know the persons, one answered with these word-S : 
'Marry, my lord, by intelligence of their favour.' 
' What mean you by that ? ' quoth I. ' Marry,' said 
thej, ' one of the parties hath a hooked nose.' ' And 
have you,' quoth I, 'no other mark?' 'ISTo,' saith 
they. And then I asked who appointed them ; and 
they answered one Bankes, a Head Constable, whom 
I willed to be sent to me." 

The tricks of the sharpers and thieves of London 
are minutely described by Greene in his inimitable 
pamphlets. Tlie Second Part of Connie-Catching (1591) 
tells a story, newly reported to Greene while he was 
writing, of a trick put upon a country farmer, in 
the walks of St. Paul's, by a company of foists, or 
cut-purses. The farmer kept his hand in his pocket, 
and his purse in his hand, so that it was impossible 
to do any good with him, whether by jostling him, or 
claiming acquaintance and offering to shake him by 
the hand. Then two of the foists concocted a plan, 
and one of them "went to the farmer and walked 
directly before him, and next him, three or four 
turns : at last, standing still, he cried, ' Alas, honest 
man, help me, I am not well ! ' and with that sunk 
down suddenly in a swoon. The poor farmer, seeing 
a proper young gentleman, as he thought, fall dead 

E 



60 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

afore him, stepped to him, held him in his arms, 
rubbed him and chafed him ; at this there gathered 
a great multitude of people about him ; and the whilst 
the foist drew the farmer's purse and away." This is 
the identical trick put upon the clown by Autolycus, 
who, being a doctor of the mystery, scorns the aid 
of an accomplice, and carries out his purpose single- 
handed, with many refinements of humorous audacity. 
Even Falstaff, though he is of Shakespeare's making, 
was not made out of nothing. It is vain and foolish 
to seek for a single original, whether in the dramatist, 
Henry Chettle, " sweating and blowing by reason of 
his fatness," or in any of his contemporaries. We 
may boldly say of Falstaff, as another of Shake- 
speare's highest creations says of himself, ^^ There is 
no such man : it is impossible." So illimitable a body 
of vitality, steeped in so much wit, is not in Nature ; 
and if it were, a great dramatist does not work in ser- 
vile fashion from individual models. But Falstaff is 
pure Elizabethan; and here and there in the all too 
scanty human records of that time we meet with a 
comic exploit that seems to remind us of our old friend, 
or are caught by a trick of speech that comes to us with 
a strangely familiar ring. Falstaff was never at the 
end of his resources ; and if he had chosen to inveigh 
against his own manner of life, not without some 
sidelong depreciation of his companions, might he not 
have spoken after this fashion : " Now, Lord ! what a 
man is he ; he was not ashamed, being a Gentleman, 
yea, a man of good years, and much authority, and 
the head Officer of a Duke's house, to play at Dice 
in an Ale house with boys, bawds and varlets. It had 
been a great fault to play at so vile a game among 
such vile persons, being no Gentleman, being no Officer, 
being not of such years j but being both a man of 



n.] STRATPORD AND LONDON 61 

fair lands, of an ancient house, of great authority, an 
Officer of a Duke, yea, and to such a Duke, and a man 
of such years that his white hairs should warn him to 
avoid all such folly, to play at such a game with such 
Eoysters and such Varlets, yea, and that in such an 
house as none comes thither but Thieves, Bawds, and 
Ruffians ; now before God, I cannot speak shame 
enough on him " ? This speech, which is given as an 
example in Thomas Wilson's Art of Rhetoric (1553), 
has not Falstaff's wit, but it has the rhetorical syntax 
which he borrows when he rides the high horse. And 
something of his wit, too, was to be found among the 
knights of the road. Thomas Harman, the Kentish 
Justice of the Peace, tells of an adventure that befell 
an old man, a tenant of his own, who was wont to go 
marketing twice a week to London. On one of these 
journeys this old man overtook two "rufflers," or 
broken soldiers of fortune who had taken to the high- 
way, riding together quietly, the one carrying the 
other's cloak, like master and man. They talked 
pleasantly with him till they came to a lonely part of 
the road ; then they led his horse into a wood and 
asked him how much money he had in his purse. He 
confessed that he had just seven shillings. But when 
the robbers came to search, they found, besides the 
seven shillings, an angel which the old man had charged 
his wife to keep safely for him, but she had forgotten 
it, and left it in his purse. Then the gentleman-thief 
began to bless himself, saying, " Good Lord, what a 
world is this ! How may a man believe or trust in the 
same ? See you not," quoth he, " this old knave told 
me that he had but seven shillings ; and here is more 
by an angel. What an old knave and a false knave 
have we here," quoth this ruffler ; " Our Lord have 
mercy on us, will this world never be better ? " — and 



52 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

with that they went their way. This speech is in the 
very vein of Falstaff ; it was spoken near Shooter's Hill, 
in the neighbourhood of Blackheath, about 1560 a.d. 

Illustrations of this kind are not beside the mark. 
Shakespeare lived in an age of glitter and pageantry, 
of squalor and wickedness, of the lust of the eye and 
the pride of life, — an age of prodigality, adventure, 
bravery, and excess. All this life has passed, leaving 
us a heap of dusty legal documents, and a small library 
of books, written, for the most part, by quiet students 
who took refuge in literature from the rush and turmoil 
of the age. We make much of the books, and patiently 
search them through and through for the genesis of 
Shakespeare's ideas. But the secret is not to be found 
among these deposits: the life that surrounded him 
has vanished; the stream of movement has ceased; 
and we are left raking for chance memorials in the dried 
and deserted channel. 

The plays give abundant evidence of his knowledge 
of the town. Tavern-life counted for much in that 
day. At inns or taverns a newly arrived stranger would 
pick up his earliest acquaintance; and later, would 
meet the company of his friends. In Tlie Taming of the 
Shrew the disguised pedant claims acquaintance with 
Baptista on the ground that twenty years agone they 
had been fellow-lodgers at the Pegasus in Genoa. The 
sea-captain in Twelfth Night lodges '^in the south 
suburbs, at the Elephant.'^ In Tlie Comedy of Errors 
there are many inns — the Centaur, the Tiger, and the 
Porpentine. Of London taverns, the Boar's Head in 
East Cheap has been made famous for ever by the 
patronage of Falstaff and his crew; as the Mermaid 
was famous for the club of wits, established by Ealeigh 
and Marlowe, honoured by Shakespeare, and super- 
seded by the later gatherings in the Apollo room of 



II.] STRATFORD AND LONDON 53 

the Devil Tavern, where Ben Jonson presided. In 
that age of symbol and emblem private houses and 
shops bore a sign, which might either serve as a proper 
name, to identify the house, or might indicate the 
business of the tenant. Benedick, in J^hich Ado, speaks 
of the sign of blind Cupid " at the door of a brothel- 
house." An allusion to this sign enhances the force 
of King Lear's speech, when, in his terrible passion 
against the generation of mankind, he says to Gloucester, 
" Dost thou squiny at me ? No, do thy worst, blind 
Cupid ; I'll not love." Measure for Measiire, and the 
Fourth Act of Pericles (which no pen but his could have 
written), prove Shakespeare's acquaintance with the 
darker side of the life of the town, as it might be seen 
in Pickt-hatch or the Bankside. He does not fear to 
expose the purest of his heroines to the breath of this 
infection ; their virtue is not ignorance ; " 'tis in grain : 
'twill endure wind and weather." In nothing is he 
more himself than in the little care that he takes to 
provide shelter for the most delicate characters of 
English fiction. They owe their education to the 
larger world, not to the drawing-room. Even Miranda, 
who is more tenderly guarded than Isabella or Marina, 
is not the pretty simpleton that some later renderings 
have made of her ; when Prospero speaks of the 
usurping Duke as being no true brother to him, she 
replies composedly : 

I should sin 

To think but nobly of my grandmother: 

Good wombs have borne bad sons. 

Shakespeare's heroines are open-eyed ; therein resem- 
bling himself, who turned away from nothing that 
bears the human image. He knew those ^' strong 
houses of sorrow," the prisons of London — as indeed 
they were easy to be known when Master Caper, or 



54 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

any other ill-starred young man, might find himself 
inside one of them, at the instance of a usurer, " for 
a commodity of brown paper and old ginger." He 
marked the fashions of the youth; the gallants and 
military adventurers^ 

Rash, inconsiderate_, fiery voluntaries, 

Witli ladies' faces, and fierce dragons' spleen ; 

the demure and peace-loving young gentlemen, " lisp- 
ing hawthorn-buds, that come like women in men's 
apparel, and smell like Bucklersbury in simple-time ; " 
and those more hardened fortune-seekers who were 
waiting in the river-side resorts for a chance to put to 
sea, " that their business might be everything, and 
their intent everywhere." He watched with gently 
critical humour the goings and comings of the "douce 
folk that lived by rule," the sober tradespeople of 
the City, who, with their wives and daughters, were 
puritanically given, and shunned the theatre. He 
touches on Puritanism, from time to time, with the 
lightest of hands, but not so lightly as to leave any 
room for mistake. This people, who sang psalms to 
hornpipe tunes, and were willing to make trading 
profits out of the theatre which they condemned, had 
no enemy in Shakespeare; but he knows them, and 
knows their besetting weaknesses, and smiles. Their 
preciseness of speech appears in Parolles, who, when 
he is told that his lord and master is married, answers 
with a pious reservation — "He is my good Lord; 
whom I serve above is my Master." The audience at 
the Globe Theatre in the suburb of the Bankside 
understood the allusion very well when the clown, in 
Measure for Measure, announces that all houses of ill- 
repute in the suburbs of Vienna must be plucked down ; 
as for those in the city, " they shall stand for seed : 



II.] STRATFORD AND LONDON 55 

tliey had gone down too, but that a wise bnrgher put 
in for them." From the high-priest of Baal, Master 
William Shakespeare, his precise brethren might have 
had that " schooling in the pleasures '^ which they 
most needed ; they might have learnt that " though 
Honesty be no Puritan, yet it will do no hurt." But 
they denied themselves the opportunity. 

After some years of life and work as an obscure 
adventurer, Shakes|)eare emerged from the ranks, and 
set his foot firmly on the ladder of fame. The great 
and immediate success of his Venus and Adonis (1593), 
which he dedicated to the Earl of Southampton, 
was in all likelihood the beginning of his good for- 
tune. Plays had no patrons save the managers and 
the public ; a poem, if it found acceptance, might win 
for its author admission to the society of men of rank 
and influence. Not long after this we hear of Shake- 
speare acting at Greenwich Palace before the Queen ; 
and thenceforward he probably found easy access to 
the highest courtly circles, and observed them as 
closely as he had observed the life of the streets. He 
sees the problem of government from many points of 
view, but most readily and habitually from the point 
of view of the ruling classes. Royalty was gracious 
to him. Ben Jonson speaks of 

those flights upon the banks of Thames, 
That so did take Eliza and our James ; 

and there are many indications and traditions of the 
favour that he enjoyed under both monarchs. He did 
not disdain to play the courtier. He celebrated the 
praises of both his sovereigns, choosing for commenda- 
tion those gifts and graces on which they most prided 
themselves. Elizabeth is praised for her virgin estate ; 
James for his supernatural powers of healing, and 



56 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

his strange gift of prophecy. Tlie Merry Wives 
was written out of compliment to the one; the 
subject of Macbeth was probably chosen to gratify 
the other. Of the nobility, we may infer that Shake- 
speare was in friendly personal relations with South- 
ampton, who is said to have given him a thousand 
pounds '' to enable him to go through with a purchase 
which he heard he had a mind to " ; with Essex, who 
is lauded in Henry V. ; and with the " incomparable 
pair of brethren," William, Earl of Pembroke, and 
Philip, Earl of Montgomery, to whom the First Folio 
is dedicated in recognition of the favour they had 
shown to the author when living. Some of the plays 
— A Midsummer Night^ s Dream, TheTempest, Gymbeline, 
Henry VHI. — were obviously performed on special 
courtly occasions ; those that include a masque could 
not have been presented with due elaboration on the 
public stage. All that we know testifies to Shake- 
speare's familiarity with the life of the Court ; he had 
been present at state ceremonies, when great clerks 
greeted Royalty with premeditated welcomes, which 
broke down under the weight of the occasion; he 
delighted in that quickness of witty retort which was 
cultivated in courtly speech, and in that graciousness 
and urbanity of bearing which is sometimes found in 
his princely men, and always in his great ladies. In 
Xoi?e'sXa5owr'sXosi the Princess, and the Princess alone, 
is considerate and kindly to " poor Maccabaeus " and 
" brave Hector " ; in Twelfth Night the Countess Olivia 
treats her drunken kinsman and his foolish friend with 
a certain charming protective care, and attends to 
Malvolio's wrongs before quietly accepting, for herself, 
the hand of Sebastian. 

Of the incidents of his life in London nothing is 
known. One anecdote, belonging to the earlier years 



II.] STRATFORD AND LONDON 67 

of that life, is recorded — just such an anecdote as 
young law-students might be expected to tell of a 
popular actor-manager, and not deserving repetition, 
were it not the single piece of gossip concerning 
Shakespeare which was set down on paper during his 
residence in London and has survived. The Diary of 
John Manningham, barrister-at-law, tells, under the 
year 1601, how, once upon a time, a City dame, infatu- 
ated with Burbage in the part of Richard III., made an 
assignation with him for the evening. Shakespeare, 
overhearing their conversation, was beforehand with 
Burbage. and was kindly entertained. "Then message 
being brought that Richard the Third was at the door, 
Shakespeare caused return to be made that William 
the Conqueror was before Richard the Third." Of a 
quarter of a century of life and experience this one 
small doubtful jest is all that has been chronicled ; and 
Hamlet may point the moral. 

Erom the evidence of the plays it has been argued 
that Shakespeare must have travelled. Doubtless he 
often went with his company of actors on their 
summer tours among provincial towns. It is unlikely 
that he ever crossed the Channel, or visited Scotland. 
Certain of his allusions, in Hamlet and the Italian 
plays, show some detailed local knowledge of Elsinore 
and of Italy. The name Gobbo, for instance, which 
he gives to the clown in Tlie Merchant of Venice, is the 
name of an ancient stone in the market-place of that 
city ; and when he speaks of the common ferry as 
"the tranect," the word seems to be a mistaken or 
misprinted adaptation of the Italian word traghetto. 
But this is nothing: Venice, in her ancient glory, 
attracted crowds of travellers ; and, without troubling 
himself to put a question, Shakespeare must have 
heard innumerable stories and memories from that 



58 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

centre of life and commerce. In this age of cheap 
printed information we are too apt to forget how 
large a part of his knowledge he must have gathered 
in talk. Books were licensed and guarded; but in 
talk there was free trade. He must often have 
listened to tales, like those told by Othello, of the 
wonders of the New World. He musfc often have 
seen the affected traveller, described in King John, 
dallying with his tooth-pick at a great man's table, 
full of elaborate compliment. 

And talking of the Alps and Apennines, 
The Pyrenean and the river Po. 

The knowledge that he gained from such talk, if 
it was sometimes remote and curious, was neither 
systematic nor accurate; and this is the knowledge 
reflected in the plays. 

Through all the years of his strenuous life in 
London his affections were still constant to the place 
of his birth, which seems to have remained the home 
of his family. When money came to him, it was 
spent on acquiring property at Stratford. In 1597 
he bought and repaired New Place, the stateliest 
house in the town, and to this he added from time to 
time by large purchases of arable land, pasture land, 
and tithes. " He was wont," says Aubrey, " to go to 
his native country once a year." " He frequented the 
plays all his younger time," says Ward, " but in his 
elder days lived at Stratford, and supplied the stage 
with two plays every year, and for that had an allow- 
ance so large that he spent at the rate of a thousand 
a year, as I have heard." For many years before 
he retired he was probably much at Stratford, and 
his greatest plays, Othello, Kiyig Lear, Macbeth, and 
others, were probably written during the summer 



n.] STRATFORD AND LONDON 6'.) 

season at New Place, as they were certainly acted on 
the boards of the Globe Theatre in Southwark. Tin- 
parish register of Stratford has preserved for us the 
record of some of the chief events of his private life. 
In 1596 his only son, Hamnet, died ; and those who 
seek in the plays for a reflection of his personal history 
are perhaps justified in finding some shadow of his 
sorrow expressed in the pathetic fate of Arthur and 
the passionate grief of Constance, in King John. In 
1607 his eldest daughter, Susanna, was married to 
John Hall, a doctor of medicine; in the following 
year his mother died. During the last three or four 
years of his life he is reported to have lived wholly 
at Stratford, in retirement ; on the 10th of February, 
1616, his daughter Judith was married to Thomas 
Quiney, vintner ; on the 25th of March he signed his 
will ; on the 23rd of April he died, and was buried in 
the chancel of Stratford Church. 

His will makes a fairly regular and normal dis- 
position of his property among his family and kins- 
folk. The only professional friends mentioned are his 
'•' fellows," John Heminge, Richard Burbage, and Henry 
Condell, who receive twenty-six shillings and eight- 
pence apiece to buy them rings. Of these E-ichard 
Burbage was the actor of the great tragic parts in the 
plays ; the other two were subsequently the editors of 
the first collected edition. The affectionate bequest to 
them in the will, taken in connection with their ov/n 
statements in the preface to the Folio of 1623, gives 
them high authority as editors ; even though their 
work is deformed, in parts, by serious blunders. A 
legitimate inference from the recorded facts, and from 
the strangely varying merits of the texts of the several 
plays, as printed in the Folio, is that Shakespeare 
before his death had begun to make preparations for 



60 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

a collected edition. Some few jjlays he probably had 
by him in autograph; some he had scored and cor- 
rected on playhouse transcripts or on the faulty 
quarto copies which had been printed during his life- 
time; many others had received no revision at his 
hands. The collection of his dramatic " papers," such 
as it was, passed into the care of Heminge and Condell ; 
and they discharged their trust. Where the Folio 
differs materially from earlier quarto versions, the 
taste of modern editors may prefer the one or the 
other, but there can be no question which comes to 
us with the higher authority. The earlier editions 
preserve many passages, undoubtedly by Shakespeare, 
which are omitted in the Folio ; but Shakespeare was 
first of all a playwright, and the omissions often 
improve the play. Most modern editions include all 
the matter which was omitted in the Folio, and retain 
all the matter which made its first appearance there. 
This plan has advantages, especially for those who 
make use of Shakespeare's work as a lexicon of speeches 
and sentiments. But it has one grave disadvantage ; 
it presents us with some of the plays in a form which 
was not, and cannot have been, authorised by Shake- 
speare at any time in his career. There is no escape 
from the Folio : for twenty of the plays it is our sole 
authority; for most of the remainder it is the best 
authority that we shall ever know. 

In the latest plays the country life of Stratford re- 
asserts itself. After all our martial and political 
adventures, our long-drawn passions and deadly sor- 
rows, we are back in Perdita's flower-garden, and 
join in the festivities of a sheep-shearing. A new 
type of character meets us in these plays ; a girl, 
innocent, frank, dutiful, and wise, cherished and 
watched over by her devoted father, or restored to him 



II.] STRATFORD AND LONDON 61 

after long separation. It is impossible to escape the 
thought that we are indebted to Judith Shakespeare 
for something of the beauty and simplicity which 
appear in Miranda and Perdita, and in the earlier 
sketch of Marina. In his will Shakespeare bequeaths 
to Judith a " broad silver-gilt bowl," — doubtless the 
bride-cup that was used at her wedding. There were 
many other girls within reach of his observation, but 
(such are the limitations of humanity) there were few 
so likely as his own daughter to exercise him in dis- 
interested sympathy and insight, or to touch him with 
a sense of the pathos of youth. 

These speculations may very easily be carried too 
far; and they bring with them this danger, that 
prosaic minds take them for a key to the plays, and 
translate the most exquisite works of imagination 
into dull chronicles and gossip. Perhaps we do best 
to abide by the bare facts, and the straightforward 
tale that they tell. So great is the power of Shake- 
speare's name to stimulate unbridled curiosity that 
whole volumes have been filled with the discussion 
of questions which, even if he were now alive, we 
could not answer. What was his religious creed? 
He was baptized, and had his children baptized, accord- 
ing to the rites of the Church of England. Was he 
happily married ? If he had lived in a town of a 
hundred newspapers, all treasured and consulted, 
there would still be no evidence to satisfy us on this 
point. The broad outlines of his life are not obscure. 
He went to London to seek his fortune, and when 
he had found it there, returned to Stratford, and 
established himself with his wife and family in peace 
and prosperity. It is as simple as a fairy-tale. If we 
must needs look closer, and read the plays into the 
life, there is nothing to alter in the story. We know 



62 SHAKESPEARE [chap. ii. 

that he went through deep waters, no man deeper, 
and came out on the other side. The simple pieties 
of life were at all times dearest to him. He was 
never uprooted from the place of his nativity, nor 
deceived by the spirits of his own raising. His 
attachment to his birthplace, his family, and his early 
friends might be fairly expressed in the subtle meta- 
phor of the greatest of his younger contemporaries — 
a metaphor in which he would have found nothing 
extravagant or absurd. The vast circle of his experi- 
ence was kept true by the stability of his first affec- 
tions, as the motion of a pair of compasses is controlled 
from the fixed centre. 

Such wilt thou be to me, who must 
Like th' other foot obliquely run. 
Thy firmness makes my circle just, 
And makes me end where I begun. 



CHAPTER III 

BOOKS AND POETRY 

It is safe to assert that Shakespeare was a poet before 
he was a dramatist. Of his first steps in the practice 
of poetry nothing is known ; but the study of his plays 
and poems has thrown some light on his dealings with 
literature. Books served him in two ways ; as a mine, 
and as a school : he lifted from them the tales that he 
rehandled, and he learned from them some part of his 
poetic and dramatic method. 

His literary sources have been so carefully identified 
and so exhaustively studied, that it is possible to make 
a long catalogue of the books that he read or consulted. 
The slow-footed and painstaking pursuit of him by the 
critics through ways that he trod so carelessly and 
lightly would furnish a happy theme for his own wit 
and irony. The world lay open to him, and he had 
small patience with the tedious processes of minute 
culture. He was a hungry and rapid reader; and 
has expressed, with something of a witty young man's 
intolerance, his contempt for more laborious methods : 

Study is like the heaven's glorious sun, 

That will not be deep-search'd with saucy looks ; 

Small have continual plodders ever won 

Save base authority from others' books. 

In Stratford he can have had no great choice of books, 
though we may assume that he read most of those he 

63 






64 SHAKESPEAKE [chap. 

could lay his hands on. There is extant a private 
account-book containing an inventory of the furniture 
and books belonging to Sir William More, of Loseley, 
in the last year of the reign of Queen Mary, some 
seven years before Shakespeare was born. This list 
has nothing to do with Shakespeare, but it serves to 
show what books were to be found in the library of 
a country gentleman of literary tastes and easy, 
though not ample, means. There is a selection of 
the Latin classics, including works by Ovid, Horace, 
Juvenal, Suetonius, Apuleius, and a volume of ex- 
tracts from Terence. Cicero's Offices, and Thucydides, 
occur in the English translations of Whittington 
and Nicolls. In Italian there are Petrarch, Boc- 
caccio, Machiavel, and the Book of the Courtier. 
Medi8eval_lifc^^ature is represented by the Golden 
Legend, Vincentius Lirinensis, Albertus De Secretis, 
and Cato's Precepts; the Revival of Learning by 
More (the Utopia), Erasmus (the Adages and the 
Praise of Folly), and Marcellus Palingenius. There 
is a fair number of Chronicles, including Higden, 
Fabyan, Harding, and Froissart. The English list 
includes works by Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, John 
Heywood, Skelton, Alexander Barclay, and a liberal 
allowance of books of Songs, Proverbs, Fables, and 
Ballads. An English Bible, copies of the New Testa- 
ment in Latin, French, and Italian, Elyot's Latin 
Dictionary, an Italian Dictionary, some books on 
law, physic, and land-surveying, ^^ a book of the 
Turk," and "a treatise of the newe India," make 
up the list. Last, and never to be forgotten in 
estimating the poetic influences of the time, in the 
parlour there was a pair of virginals, a lute, and a 
gittern. This is a richer collection of books than 
Shakespeare was likely to find in Stratford, and it 



III.] BOOKS AND POETRY 65 

is noticeable that, except the Latin poets whom he 
read at school, none of the authors occurring in the 
above list influenced him in any marked fashion. He 
was a child of the English Eenaissance, and it was 
the books of his own age that first caught him in 
their toils. Even Chaucer, who never lost popularity, 
lost esteem with the younger generation of Eliza- 
bethans, and suffered from the imputation of rusticity. 
But the translations and imitations of the classics, 
which poured from the press during the second half of 
the century, the poems and love-pamphlets and plays 
of the University wits, the tracts and dialogues in the 
prevailing Italian taste — all these were the making 
of the new age and the favourite reading of Shake- 
speare, who can hardly have become intimate with 
them until he first set foot in London. No doubt he 
ranged up and down the bookstalls of Paul's Church- 
yard, browsing among "the innumerable sorts of Eng- 
lish books, and infinite fardles of printed pamphlets '^ 
wherewith, according to a contemporary, " this Country 
is pestered, all shops stuffed, and every study fur- 
nished." Here for a few shillings he may have bought 
books printed by Caxton and his pupils, and so made 
acquaintance with Gower, whom he read, and with 
Malory, some of whose phrases he seems to echo. 
Here, no doubt, he tore the heart, at a single reading, 
out of many a pamphlet and many a novel. He was 
no bibliophile, though he gives utterance, with curious 
frequency, to the opinion that a good book should 
have a good binding. He read the works of his con- 
temporaries as they appeared. Marlowe, his master in 
the drama, he has honoured in the most unusual fash- 
ion by direct quotation : 

Dead shepherd, now I find thy saw of might : 
" Who ever loved that loved not at first sight? " 



ee SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

From Greene's story of Dorastus and Fawnia lie took 
the plot of The Winter^ s Tale-, and it is permissible to 
think that he commemorated the unhappy life and 
early death of Greene, who had died reviling him, 
in those lines of A Midsummer JSfighfs Dream which 
describe 

The thrice three Muses, mourning for the death 
Of learning late deceas'd in beggary. 

On Thomas Lodge's novel Rosalynde he based his 
play of ^s You Like It. He read Euphues, of course ; 
borrowed from it, and in Henry IV. ridiculed its af- 
fectations. He read Sidney's Arcadia, and perhaps 
took from it the underplot of Gloucester and his sons 
in King Lear. And apart from these famous instances, 
there is hardly a pamphlet, in that age of pamphlets, 
which the student can read in the certainty that 
Shakespeare has not been before him. The names of 
the devils in King Lear seem to be borrowed from an 
obscure Protestant tract, of 1603, called A Declaration 
of egregious Popish Impostures. The arguments of Shy- 
lock, in his speeches before the Duke, have been sup- 
posed to owe something to Silvayn's Orator, a book 
of declamations translated in 1596 from the French ; 
while a very close parallel to Portia's reply has been 
found in the prose of Seneca. These are instances 
which might be multiplied a hundredfold ; and al- 
though few are certain cases of debt, their cumulative 
effect is irresistible. Shakespeare was one of those SAvift 
and masterly readers who know what they want of a 
book ; they scorn nothing that is dressed in print, but 
turn over the pages with a quick discernment of all 
that brings them new information, or jumps with their 
thought, or tickles their fancy. Such a reader will per- 
haps have done with a volume in a few minutes, yet 



iir.] BOOKS AND POETRY 67 

wliat he has taken from it he keeps for years. He is 
a live man; and is sometimes wrongly judged by 
slower wits to be a learned man. 

Among the publications of his own age, some few 
stand out pre-eminent as books that were of more 
than passing interest to Shakespeare, books that he 
ransacked from cover to cover for the material of his 
plays. The books that served him best for his dramatic 
plots were Eaphael Holinshed's Chronicles, Sir Thomas 
North's translation of Plutarch's Lives, and the Italian 
novelists, in many translations, chief among which must 
be reckoned Painter's Palace of Pleasure, containing a 
selection of the choicest novels of the great Italian 
masters. These books, one would say, he must have 
owned. The novelists supplied him, either directly, 
or through the medium of some earlier play, with 
much of the material of his comedy. Prom Holinshed 
he took the substance of his English historical plays ; 
and his study of the book acquainted him also 
with those ancient British legends which he trans- 
figured in King Lear, Macbeth, and Gymhelhie. The 
Italian novels and the English chronicle history cannot 
compare, in the world's literature, with the thrice- 
renowned Lives of Plutarch ; yet all three were worthy 
to be read and studied by Shakespeare. 

An examination of the use that he makes of these, 
his principal sources, shows that he did not pay the 
same measure of respect to them all. The novels he 
treats with the utmost freedom, altering them, or 
adding to them, to suit his fancy. He brings them 
out of the languid realm of romance by inventing 
new realistic characters, who give something of the 
diversity of life to the story, and save it from 
swooning into sheer convention. Orlando and Rosa- 
iind must run the gauntlet of criticism at the hands of 



68 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

Touchstone and Jaques ; the love-affair of Eomeo and 
Juliet is seen in its more prosaic aspects through the 
eyes of Mercutio and the Nurse. In the interests of 
comedy he does away with much of the pain and 
squalor of his originals. In Greene's novel Bellaria, 
the original of Hermione in The Winter's Tale, dies ; in 
Shakespeare's play she is kept alive, by strange means, 
for the final reconciliation. In Twelfth Night, again, 
the story, as it is told by Barnabe Riche, from whose 
novel of Apollonius and Silla Shakespeare seems to 
have taken the main incidents of the play, has in 
it strong elements of pain and tragedy. Viola, in 
Eiche's story, has been wronged and deserted by the 
Duke ; Olivia, in the course of the intrigue, is betrayed 
by Sebastian. These ugly features of the story were 
altered by Shakespeare; and the result is a pure 
comedy of fancy, a world of romantic incident seen 
through a golden haze of love and mirth. So he 
moulded a story to his liking, turning it, as seemed 
good to his mood and judgment, into tragedy, or 
comedy, or romance. In the plays that deal with 
English history he was compelled to keep closer to his 
sources ; but he was fortunate in the authors that he 
used. The Chronicles of Holinshed, unlike more 
modern histories, are dramatic in essence ; they leave 
constitutional problems on one side and make the 
most of striking events and characters. The very 
title-page of Hall's Chronicle is a fair enough descrip- 
tion of Shakespeare's theme : " The Union of the two 
Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York, 
being long in continual dissension for the crown of 
this noble realm, with all the acts done in both the 
times of the princes both of the one lineage and of 
the other, beginning at the time of King Henry 
the Fourth, the first author of this division, and so 



III.] BOOKS AND POETRY 69 

successively proceeding to the reign of the high and 
prudent prince King Henry the Eight, the undubitate 
flower and very heir of both the said lineages." That 
irony of kingship, which Mr. Pater conceives it is 
Shakespeare's main purpose to set forth, is already 
present in the mind of the prose chronicler, who thus 
comments on the fate of King Eichard ii. : " What 
trust is in this world, what surety jnan hath of his 
life, and what constancy is in the unstable commonalty, 
all men may apparently perceive by the ruin of this 
noble prince, which being an undubitate king, crowned 
and anointed by the spiritualty, honoured and exalted 
by the nobility, obeyed and worshipped of the common 
people, was suddenly deceived by them which he most 
trusted, betrayed by them whom he had preferred, 
and slain by them whom he had brought up and 
nourished : so that all men may perceive and see that 
fortune weigheth princes and poor men all in one 
balance." Sometimes Shakespeare follows his authority 
so tamely that he versifies whole speeches from the 
chronicler, working, as it would seem, with the book 
open before him. The discussion on the Salic Law 
in Henry V-, and the long dialogue between Malcolm 
and Macduff, in the Fourth Act of Macbeth, are taken 
directly from Holinshed, and are very imperfectly 
dramatised. It is to passages like these that Dryden 
alludes when he speaks of Shakespeare falling " into 
a carelessness, and, as I may call it, a lethargy of 
thought, for whole scenes together." But when a 
crisis calls for treatment, when his imagination takes 
fire, or his sense of humour is touched, he gives over 
borrowing, and coins from his own mint. Every 
word spoken by Falstaff is a word of life, for Falstaff 
was unknown to the chroniclers. The character of 
Lady Macbeth is represented in Holinshed by a single 



70 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

sentence : " But specially his wife lay sore upon him 
to attempt the thing, as she that was very ambitious, 
burning in unquenchable desire to bear the name of a 
Queen." From this bare hint Shakespeare created his 
murderess, her narrow practical intensity, her heroic 
courage and fierce will, holding imagination at bay, 
soothing and supporting her husband, making light of 
the deed to be done, until human nature avenges 
itself on her, and she too falls a victim to air-drawn 
fancies, and hears voices in her sleep. The most 
famous of the freedoms taken with Holinshed is to be 
found in King Lear. In the chronicle version Cordelia 
survives her misfortunes, regains her kingdom, and 
comforts the declining years of her father ; but before 
Shakespeare reached the close of his play he had 
wound the tragedy up to such a pitch that a 
happy ending, as it is called, was unthinkable; a 
deeper peace than the peace of old age by the fireside 
was needed to compose that heartrending storm of 
passion. In this as in other cases Holinshed was 
used by Shakespeare as a kind of mechanical aid to 
start his imagination on its flight and launch it into 
its own domain. 

With Plutarch the case is far different. Tlie Lives of 
the Nohle Grecians and Romans was the only supremely 
great literary work which Shakespeare set himself to 
fashion into drama. There are a hundred testimonies 
to the power and influence of this book of the ages. 
It has been the breviary of soldiers, statesmen, and 
orators, and has fascinated readers so diverse as Henry 
of Navarre and Miss Hannah More. In Plutarch 
Shakespeare found some of the most superb passages 
of the history of the world, great deeds nobly nar- 
rated, and great characters worthily drawn. More- 
over, his material was already more than half shaped 



III.] BOOKS AND POETRY 71 

to his handj for Plutarch writes lives, not annals, and 
pays more attention to the character of men, even in 
its humblest manifestations, than to the general and 
philosophic causes of events. " They who write lives," 
says Montaigne, " by reason that they take more 
notice of counsels than events, more of what proceeds 
from within doors than of what happens without, are 
the fittest for my perusal ; and therefore, of all others, 
Plutarch is the man for me." Plutarch was the man 
for Shakespeare, and in Plutarch alone he sometimes 
met his match. Some of the finest pieces of eloquence 
in the Eoman plays are merely Sir Thomas North's 
splendid prose strung into blank verse. Shakespeare 
follows his authority phrase by phrase and word by 
word, not, as with Holiushed, because his interest 
flagged, but because he knew when to let well alone. 
It may even be said that in some places he has fallen 
short of his original. There is a passage in Plutarch's 
Life of Antony, tremulous with suspense and dim 
forebodings, wherein is described how the god Her- 
cules, on the night before the last surrender, forsook 
the cause of Antony. ^' The self-same night within 
little of midnight, when all the city was quiet, full 
of fear and sorrow, thinking what would be the issue 
and end of this war: it is said that suddenly they 
heard a marvellous sweet harmony of sundry sorts 
of instruments of music, with the cry of a multi- 
tude of people, as they had been dancing, and had 
sung as they use in Bacchus' feasts, with movings and 
turnings after the manner of the Satyrs : and it seemed 
that this dance went through the city unto the gate 
that opened to the enemies, and that all the troop, 
that made this noise they heard, went out of the city 
at that gate. Now such as in reason sought the depth 
of the interpretation of this wonder, thought that it 



72 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

was the god unto whom Antonius bare singular 
devotion, to counterfeit and resemble him, that did 
forsake them." Shakespeare desired to preserve this 
effect ; and in the Fourth Act of Antony and Cleopatra 
he introduces a music of hautboys under the stage, 
and makes the sentries discuss its meaning. But this 
is a poor substitute for Plutarch's description. The 
death of Cleopatra, again, as it is described in Plu- 
tarch, is a combination of the intensity and minute- 
ness of realism with the dignity and reserve of the 
best classic art. " Her death was very sudden. For 
those whom Caesar sent unto her ran thither in all 
haste possible, and found the soldiers standing at the 
gate, mistrusting nothing nor understanding of her 
death. But when they opened the doors, they found 
Cleopatra stark dead, laid upon a bed of gold, attired 
and arrayed in her royal robes, and one of her two 
women, which was called Iras, dead at her feet ; and 
the other woman, called Charmian, half dead, and 
trembling, trimming the diadem which Cleopatra ware 
upon her head. One of the soldiers seeing her angrily 
said unto her : ' Is that well done, Charmian ? ' ^ Very 
well,' said she again, ^and meet for a Princess de- 
scended from the race of so many noble Kings.' She 
said no more, but fell down dead, hard by the bed." 
Here the drama falls short ; perhaps because so much 
of the effect of the narrative depends on those moving 
little touches of description — the unconscious sentries, 
the trembling handmaiden — which must perforce be 
omitted in the drama, or expressed in a more trivial 
and coarser fashion by the gestures of the players. 

There is evidence to show how strong a hold 
the stories and characters of Plutarch laid upon 
Shakespeare's imagination. He must have searched 
the book carefully for tragic subjects during the last 



III.] BOOKS AND POETRY 73 

years of the sixteenth century, some time before he 
wrote Julius Caesar. From that time onward memories 
of his reading constantly recur to him, and intrude 
upon his other plays. When Horatio reminds the 
companions of his watch how 

In the most high and palmy state of Rome, 
A little ere the mightiest Julius fell, 
The graves stood tenantless and the sheeted dead 
Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets. 

the Danish courtier is borrowing his history from Plu- 
tarch. When Ban quo, on the sudden disappearance of 
the witches, exclaims — 

Were such things here as we do speak about, 
Or have we eaten on the insane root, 
That takes the reason prisoner ? 

the Scottish thane is remembering his Plutarch. 
Botanists have, as usual, given their cheerful help to 
determine the name of the insane root. Their opinions 
would have enlightened Shakespeare, for the fact is 
that he did not know its name. There lingered in his 
memory a passage from Plutarch's Life of Antony de- 
scribing how the Eoman soldiers in the Parthian war 
were forced by hunger "to taste of roots that were 
never eaten before, among the which there was one 
that killed them, and made them out of their wits." 
In Cymbeline the bed-chamber of Imogen is hung with 
tapestry representing the picture of 

Proud Cleopatra, when she met her Roman, 
And Cydnus swell'd above the banks, or for 
The press of boats, or pride. 

And the very subject of Timon of Athens was probably 
suggested by the short description of Timon which is 



74 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

given in the Life of Antony. North's Plutarch did 
more than sujjply Shakespeare with matter for his 
plays ; it excited his imagination and possessed his 
thought. 

The question of his Biblical knowledge has been 
discussed in many treatises, and involved in a net- 
work of wire-drawn arguments. Some critics have 
maintained that his reading was in the Bishops' Bible ; 
others hold for the Genevan version. Both succeed in 
establishing their case ; indeed, it would be strange if 
he had not known something of both versions. The 
Bishops' Bible was read in the churches ; the Genevan 
Bible was more widely circulated in portable editions. 
He has references to Pilate washing his hands ; to the 
Prodigal Son, to Jacob and Laban, to Lazarus and 
Dives, and the like. But it cannot be inferred from 
this that he was a deep student of the Bible. The 
phraseology of his age, like that of later ages, was 
saturated with Biblical reminiscence. The Essays of 
Mia are a tissue of Biblical phrase ; and Shakespeare's 
knowledge of the Bible, which may fairly be likened 
to Charles Lamb's, was probably acquired in casual 
and desultory fashion. 

Of modern French and Italian writers it is clear that 
those whom he knew best he knew in translation. 
Prom the plays it may be gathered that he had a 
certain colloquial knowledge of French, and, at the 
least, a smattering of Italian. The plots of Measure for 
Measure and Othello are taken from the Hecatommithi, 
a collection of Italian novels, published in 1566, by 
Giambattista Giraldi, commonly called Cinthio. The 
plot of The Merchant of Venice is taken, in the main, from 
another collection called II Pecorone, by Ser Giovanni 
Fiorentino. The Measure for Measure story had already 
been drama,tised by George Whetstone under the title 



in.] BOOKS AND POETRY 75 

of Promos an'Z Cassandra (1578), and there are traces 
of an earlier dramatic handling of the Merchant of 
Venice story, in a lost play called The Jew. But no 
intermediate form has been found for the Othello 
story ; which therefore remains the chief argument for 
Shakespeare's direct use of Italian authors. A man 
of less than his ability could learn in a few weeks 
enough Italian for a purpose like this, so that no great 
significance attaches to the discussion. He was not 
influenced by the works of Machiavel, as Marlowe 
was ; nor by those of Pietro Aretino, as Nashe was. 
An incident taken from Ariosto, whom Spenser knew 
so well, occurs in Much Ado About Nothing^ but there 
is no reason to suppose that he went further for it than 
Sir John Harington's translation of 1591. If he had 
studied Ariosto, we might expect to find more numer- 
ous and intimate marks of acquaintance ; and the same 
argument applies to Rabelais. There are substances 
which have the property of igniting each other ; and 
the fact that they never did is proof enough that they 
never came into contact. Rosalind's allusion, in As 
Tou Like It, to the size of Gargantua's mouth is 
plainly a reminiscence of a lost Elizabethan chap-book 
which gave to English readers the shell of Rabelais' 
fable without the vivifying soul ; and some few Rabe- 
laisian turns of speech, which are found on the 
lips of lago and others, even if they are original in 
Rabelais, probably came borne to Shakespeare upon 
the tide of talk. He was well acquainted, through the 
translation of Florio, with Montaigne, that other 
great pioneer of the modern spirit. It has been argued 
that a certain deeper vein of scepticism and question- 
ing, which makes its appearance in his mature tragic 
work, was borrowed from Montaigne. Certainly it 
would not be difficult to gather from Montaigne's 



76 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

Essays an anthology of passages which speak with the 
very voice of Hamlet; but the similarity seems to 
spring from the natural kinship of questioning minds, 
" Man has nothing properly his own," says Montaigne, 
" but the use of his opinions " ; and Hamlet echoes the 
thought. It is not likely that Shakespeare was de- 
pendent for so ancient a discovery on the labours of 
Florio. Was the widow, in The Taming of the Shrew, 
a pupil of Montaigne's ? In her raillery of Petruchio 
she utters the text upon which Montaigne's work 
may be said to be one long commentary : " He that is 
giddy thinks the world turns round." Was Biron in- 
debted to Montaigne ? He teaches the same doctrine 
when he remarks that " every man with his affects is 
born." The only passage of importance which Shake- 
speare certainly borrowed directly from Montaigne 
bears no witness to discipleship in thought. In his 
essay Of Cannibals Montaigne gravely argues for the 
superiority of the savage state, and drives the argu- 
ment to its full conclusion; in TJie Tempest Shake- 
speare borrows the description of the unsophisticated 
commonwealth, and plays with the idea only to 
ridicule it. Their differences are absolute : Montaigne 
is at ease, not to say exultant, in his doubt ; his 
business is to spy out human weaknesses and to put all 
human life to the question: Shakespeare does not 
withhold the question, but his eye and heart are at 
a mortal war, and in the end the gentlemen of the 
inquisition find that he belongs to the other party. 
His ultimate sympathies are with human frailty, 
human simplicity, human unreason ; and it is to these 
that he gives the last word. He has, what Montaigne 
shows no trace of, a capacity for tragic thought. 

The careful study of Shakespeare's sources, though 
it throws some light on his dramatic methods, does 



III.] BOOKS AND POETRY 77 

not bring us much nearer to the heart of the matter. 
Its results are mainly negative. The stress of our 
interpretation must not be laid upon those parts of 
his story which he borrowed from others and preserved 
unaltered. What he added to the story was himself ; 
and a comparison of what he found with what he left 
forces us to the conclusion that his choice of books 
was largely accidental. If these had not come to his 
hand, others would have served as well. Subjects fit 
for his uses lay all around him. He read Holinshed, 
and happened on the stories of King Lear and Mac- 
beth. There is nothing in these stories, as he found 
them, to awaken more than a languid interest. He 
could have made as good a tragedy of the story of 
Bluebeard — and the English critics would have 
suspected him of a covert reference to Leicester. He 
could have made an enthralling romance of the story 
of Cinderella — and the German critics would have 
found the inner meaning of the play in the Kantian 
doctrine of time. The craft and experience which 
were the making of the plays are not taken from the 
books. Plutarch stands alone ; partly because in 
Plutarch, at a time when his interest was attracted to 
politics, he found the best political handbook in the 
world ; and not less because Plutarch was near enough 
to the crisis of Roman history to catch a measure of 
the thrilling and convincing quality of things seen and 
heard. 

The literature which influenced Shakespeare most 
habitually, and left its mark everywhere on his plays, 
is literature of another kind — a kind which is hardly 
entitled to the formal dignity of the name, and may 
perhaps be more truly considered as an aspect of 
social life. His plays are extraordinarily rich in the 
floating debris of popular literature — scraps and tags 



78 SHAKESPEAKE [chap. 

and broken ends of a whole world of songs and ballads 
and romances and proverbs. In this respect he is 
notable even among his contemporaries ; few of them 
can match him in the wealth that he caught out of the 
air or picked up by the roadside. Edgar and lago, 
Petruchio and Benedick, Sir Toby and Pistol, the Fool 
in Lear and the Gravedigger in Hamlet ^ even Ophelia 
and Desdemona, are all alike singers of old songs, 
which are introduced not idly, to fill up the time or 
entertain the audience, but dramatically, to help the 
situation. From the Comedies alone a fair collection 
of proverbs might be gathered. Who said " Blessing 
of your heart, you brew good ale " ? What dramatic 
situations suggested the following — "Still swine eats 
all the draff '^ ; " God sends a curst cow short horns " 
" You have the grace of God, Sir, and he hath enough " 
" Thus must I from the smoke into the smother '^ 
" Black men are pearls in ladies' eyes " ; " There's 
small choice in rotten apples " ? These were reminis- 
cences of a humble kind, all the fitter for the purposes 
of a dramatist in that they were not stolen from books, 
but plucked out of life, where they never lack the aid 
of a vivid dramatic setting. 

There is thus no difficulty in crediting Shake- 
speare with ample opportunities for acquiring the 
stock-in-trade of a playwright. The strange thing, or 
the thing made b}'- our ignorance to seem strange, is 
that his earliest published works reveal him in a 
character wholly undramatic, as an elegiac narrative 
poet of the polite school. No biography, however 
well-informed and minute, can lay bare the processes 
of a poet's initiation in his craft, which are in their 
nature far more obscure than the history of his life 
and opinions. His education in the use of his native 
tongue, and in the appreciation of its beauties and 



III.] BOOKS AND POETRY 79 

cadences, begins at his birth, and is far advanced long 
before biography can lay hold of him. We are con- 
tent to believe that the poetic impulse was imparted to 
Cowley, and to Keats, instantaneously, by the chance 
reading of Spenser. We must be content with less 
knowledge of Shakespeare's beginnings. The song 
and dance and music of that age of licensed hilarity 
certainly did not leave Stratford unvisited. The more 
elaborate kinds of poetry, ennobled by a recognised 
ancestry, belonged to a single stock, and haunted 
courtly and metropolitan circles. It was at the Court 
of Anne Boleyn that the poetry of the sixteenth cen- 
tury was born; it was the cousin of Anne Boleyn, 
the Earl of Surrey, who became the master of all 
sonneteering lovers and all new-fangled writers of 
blank verse. The strength of the school of Surrey lay 
in its songs, which never miss the essentials of verse 
that is to be wedded to music. Even the dullest of 
the poets of that school understands a lyrical move- 
ment, while the best of them can breathe such strains 
as Wyatt's ravishing song, with the burden " My lute, 
be still, for I have done," or Gascoigne's beautiful 
Lullaby. But the school was unlucky even in its 
cradle. Protestant psalmody, which was born in the 
same Court, and countenanced by the same kingly 
favour, took possession of its simpler measures and 
degraded them to doggerel for the use of the populace. 
The Psalms of Sternhold and Hopkins commanded a 
far larger audience than the courtly poets, and shaped 
the national prosody for almost half a century. The 
monotonous emphasis of the universal "poulter's 
measure," with its shorter and longer swing, as of a 
rocking-horse, made delicacy of diction impossible ; and 
the only resource left to the oppressed poets was to 
double the monotony by a free use of alliteration. 



80 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

From the tyranny of this metre the country was 
delivered by the pens of the University wits. They 
maintained the lyrical tradition in all its fulness ; for 
the other purposes of poetry they abandoned the 
hobbling measures of Sternhold and Hopkins, Phaer 
and Twyne, and reverted to the old ten-syllable metre, 
which they rescued from the hands of pedants, and 
inspired with a various and subtle melody. In the 
form of blank verse Marlowe proved its declama- 
tory and dramatic powers ; in stanza form Peele 
and Greene, and Lodge and the poets of the Song- 
books gave it a new fluidity and sweetness, which 
sometimes ripples into lyric, sometimes sinks again 
into the quiet cadences of deliberate speech. The 
reform of verse was accompanied and stimulated, as 
it always is, by a sudden enrichment of the matter 
which verse is shaped to express. Even in England, 
the poetry of the Eenaissance ceased, for a time, to 
concern itself with man as a being under authority, 
begirt with duties and responsibilities, and doomed to 
old age and death; it turned from the consideration 
of magistrates and husbandmen to feast its eyes 
on that naked and primal world revealed by the clas- 
sical mythology, where passion ran free, restrained 
by no law save the law of beauty. The revival of 
classical myth, which in ordinary court circles was no 
more than a fashionable craze, or a fresh opportunity 
for the tailor, to Marlowe and his fellows was a new 
interpretation of life and a new warrant given to 
desire. These poets, and their master Ovid, were the 
masters of Shakespeare ; when he graduated in poetry 
it was in this school ; and it is not easy to see how the 
new poetic impulse could have come to him in Stratford. 
Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, which 
were published in 1593 and the following year, are 



III.] BOOKS AND POETRY 81 

first of all works of art. They are poetic exercises by- 
one who has set himself to prove his craftsmanship 
■upon a given subject. If traces of the prentice hand 
are visible, it is not in any uncertainty of execution, 
nor in any failure to achieve an absolute beauty, but 
rather in the very ostentation of artistic skill. There 
is no remission, at any point, from the sense of con- 
scious art. The poems are as delicate as carved ivory, 
and as bright as burnished silver. They deal with 
disappointment, crime, passion, and tragedy, yet are 
destitute of feeling for the human situation, and are, 
in effect, painless. This painlessness, which made 
Hazlitt compare them to a couple of ice-houses, is due 
not to insensibility in the poet, but to his preoccupa- 
tion with his art. He handles life from a distance, at 
two removes, and all the emotions awakened by the 
poems are emotions felt in the presence of art, not 
those suggested by life. The arts of painting and 
rhetoric are called upon to lend poetry their subjects 
and their methods. From many passages in the plays 
it may be inferred that Shakespeare loved painting, 
and was familiar with a whole gallery of Renaissance 
pictures. Portia's elaborate comparison of Bassanio to 

young Alcides, when he did redeem 
The virgin tribute paid by howling Troy 
To the sea-monster, 

is only one of many allusions which can be nothing 
but reminiscences of pictures; and in the Induction 
to Tlie Taming of the Shrew the servants submit to 
Christopher Sly a catalogue which is the best possible 
commentary on Shakespeare's early poems : 

We will fetch thee straight 
Adonis painted by a running brook, 
And Cytherea all in sedges hid, 
o 



82 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

Whicli seem to move and wanton with her breath, 
Even as the waving sedges play with wind. 

We'll show thee lo as she was a maid, 
And how she was beguiled and surpris'd, 
As lively painted as the deed was done : 

Or Daphne roaming through a thorny wood, 
Scratching her legs, that one shall swear she bleeds ; 
And at that sight shall sad Apollo weep, 
So workmanly the blood and tears are drawn. 

Here is the very theme of Venus and Adonis, and 
another theme closely akin to The Rape of Lucrece. It 
would not be rash to say outright that both the poems 
were suggested by pictures, and must be read and 
appreciated in the light of that fact. But the truth 
for criticism remains the same if they took their sole 
origin from the series of pictures painted in words by 
the master-hand of Ovid. " So workmanly the blood 
and tears are drawn." 

The rhetorical art of the poems is no less manifest. 
The tirades and laments of both poems, on Love and 
Lust, on Night, and Time, and Opportunity, are 
exquisitely modulated rhetorical diversions; they 
express rage, sorrow, melancholy, despair; and it is 
all equally soothing and pleasant, like listening to a 
dreamy sonata. Lucrece, at the tragic crisis of her 
history, decorates her speech with far-fetched illustra- 
tions and the arabesques of a pensive fancy. And 
as if her own disputation of her case were not enough, 
the poet pursues her with "sentences," conveying 
appropriate moral reflections. She is sadder than ever 
when she hears the birds sing ; and he is ready with 
the poetical statutes that apply to her case : 

'Tis double death to drown in ken of shore. 
He ten times pines that pines beholding food ; 
To see the salve doth make the wound ache more ; 
Great grief grieves most at that would do it good. 



III.] BOOKS AND POETRY 83 

There is no morality in the general scheme of these 
poems ; the morality is all inlaid, making of the poem 
a rich mosaic. The plays have to do with a world too 
real to be included in a simple moral scheme ; the 
poems with a world too artificial to be brought into 
any vital relation with morality. The main motive 
prompting the poet is the love of beauty for beauty's 
sake, and of wit for the exercise of wit. 

It is at this point that Shakespeare was touched by 
the new spirit of the Eenaissance. That great move- 
ment of the mind of man brought with it the exhilara- 
tion of an untried freedom and the zest of an unlimited 
experiment; but it took the human soul from its 
station in a balanced and rounded scheme of things, 
to deliver it over to every kind of danger and excess. 
The wonderful system of Catholic theology gave man 
his place in the universe; it taught him his duties, 
allowed for his weaknesses, and at all times exhibited 
him in so complex a scheme of fixed relations, mundane 
and celestial, extending beyond the very bounds of 
thought, that only a temper of absolute humility could 
carry the burden lightly, or look without terror down 
those endless vistas of law and providence. From his 
servant's estate in this great polity he was released 
by the Renaissance, and became his own master in 
chaos, free to design and build and inhabit for himself. 
Ttie enormous nature of the task, which after three 
centuries is still hardly begun, did not at first oppress 
him; he was like a child out of school, trying his 
strength and resource in all kinds of fantastic and 
extravagant attempts. It was an age of new philos- 
ophies, new arts, new cults ; none of them modest or 
sober, all full of the spirit of bravado, high-towering 
but not broad-based, erected as monuments to the 
skill and prowess of the individual. That arrogance 



84 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

and self-sufficiency of craft which by the men of the 
Renaissance was called virtue is found in many dif- 
ferent guises ; and Shakespeare did not wholly escape 
the prevalent infection. What the love of power was 
to Marlowe, the love of beauty was to him. In these 
early poems the Venus of the Eenaissance takes him 
captive, 

Leading him prisoner in a red-rose chain. 

The devout religion of the eye and ear is all-in-all 
to him : his world is a world of gleaming forms and 
beautiful speech. He exhibits beauty as Marlowe ex- 
hibits power, freed from all realistic human con- 
ditions. Only here and there in the poems a note of 
observation, a touch of homely metaphor, remind us 
that he is not out of reach of the solid earth that 
is hereafter to be his empire. This passionate cult 
df beauty was transformed, rather than superseded, by 
the intrusion of thought and sorrow ; so that the much 
talked of phases, or stages, in Wordsworth's love of 
nature are paralleled by similar stages in Shake- 
speare's love of humanity. If the poems were lost, we 
should know all too little of his apprenticeship, when 
human life was to him 

An appetite, a feeling, and a joy, 
That had no need of a remoter charm ; 

when his delight in the shows and exercises of the 
world left him no leisure for unintelligible problems 
or unwelcome cares. 

His early play of Titus Andronicus, which is like the 
poems, shows how strangely hard-hearted this love of 
beauty can be, and makes it easy to understand how 
he was fascinated and dominated, for a time, by 
Marlowe. Yet even in Venus and Adonis there is 
evidence that he has outgrown Marlowe, and is on 



III.] BOOKS AND POETRY 85 

the way to a serener and wiser view of things. The 
protest of Adonis, beginning " Call it not love," is un- 
like anything in Marlowe, and sounds the knell of 
violent ambitions and desires. 

Love comforteth like sunshine after rain, 
But Lust's effect is tempest after sun ; 
Love's gentle spring doth always fresh remain ; 
Lust's winter comes ere summer half be done ; 

Love surfeits not, Lust like a glutton dies; 

Love is all truth, Lust full of forged lies. 

These early exercises in description and moralisation 
served him well in his dramatic work. The same skill 
that described the hare-hunt and the escape of Adonis' 
horse is seen in the minutely drawn picture of the 
apothecary's shop in Romeo and Juliet ; but the detail 
in this later picture subserves the human drama, and 
testifies to the quickening of all Romeo's faculties by 
the sudden excitement of grief. It is not always so; 
the poet in Shakespeare sometimes forgets the dram- 
atist, and interjects a fanciful description, elabo- 
rated for its own sake, and assigned, without ceremony, 
to be spoken by the nearest stander-by. The descrip- 
tion of the little princes in the Tower, " their lips like 
four red roses on a stalk," is put into the mouths of 
their murderers ; and the landscape of Ophelia's death, 
as it is sketched by the Queen, is a wonderful piece of 
poetry, but has no dramatic value in relation to the 
speaker. 

After The Rape of Lucrece Shakespeare, so far as we 
can tell, published no more, neither poem nor drama. 
In 1609 there was issued a small quarto volume en- 
titled Shakespeare's Sonnets Never Before Imjprmted. Its 
price, at that time, was sixpence, and it was introduced 
by a dedication, which ran as follows : To the onlie beget- 
ter of these insuing Sonnets Mr. W. H. all happinesse and 



86 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

that eternitie promised by our ever-living poet wisheth the 
well-wishing adventurer in setting forth. T. T. 

This is not the place nor the time for the discussion 
of all the attempts that have been made to unravel the 
most tangled problem of Shakespeare criticism. There 
are many footprints around the cave of this mystery, 
none of them pointing in the outward direction. No 
one has ever attempted a solution of the problem with- 
out leaving a book behind him; and the shrine of 
Shakespeare is thickly hung with these votive offer- 
ings, all withered and dusty. No one has ever sought 
to gain access to this heaven of poetry by a privileged 
and secret stairway, without being blown ten thousand 
leagues awry, over the backside of the world, into the 
Paradise of Fools. The quest remains unachieved. 

Many books have been written on the dedication 
alone. Among recent adventurers, Mr. Sidney Lee 
has revived the theory of Boswell and Chalmers, 
which, by taking "begetter" in the sense of "pro- 
curer," reduces the dedication to perfect insignificance. 
The writer of the dedication, and owner of the copy- 
right, was one Thomas Thorpe, who held an obscure= 
position in the bookselling and publishing world of 
London. Shakespeare's Sonnets, as we know from 
the allusion to them, in 1598, by Francis Meres,, 
were circulated in manuscript "among his private 
friends." According to Mr. Lee, copies of them were 
privily obtained, through some unknown channel, by 
one William Hall, acting as the humble jackal of 
the obscure Thorpe, and were delivered by him 
to his master, who rew^arded him with a facetious 
dedication, couched in terms of piratical generosity. 
This theory cannot be proved, but there is nothing- 
in it to stagger belief. There are grave difficulties in 
accepting it, but perhaps they are not insuperable, and. 



III.] BOOKS AND POETRY 87 

it has one immense advantage : it makes waste-paper of 
all the acrostic literature which has gathered round the 
initials of Mr. W. H., and leaves us free to consider 
the Sonnets apart from the dedication. 

Shakespeare, it seems, did not authorise the publi- 
cation ; neither, so far as appears, did he protest, or 
take any steps to leave the world an amended version. 
The bulk of the Sonnets were written before 1599, 
when two of them, which involve the whole story 
shadowed forth in many of the others, appeared in a 
piratical publication. The order which they follow 
in Thorpe's edition has never been bettered, and in 
most places cannot be disturbed, for they often fall 
into natural groups of ten, twelve, or fourteen, closely 
connected by the sense. Some of them are addressed 
to a man, and some to a woman. They are intensely 
personal in feeling, and run through many moods. 
Some explain themselves; others certainly contain 
allusions and references to events of which we have no 
record. No more wonderful or beautiful expressions 
of affection exist in the English language, and it has 
never been seriously questioned that all the Sonnets 
are by Shakespeare. 

Are they autobiographical ? Professor Dowden has 
replied to the question in modest and guarded words. 
*^I believe," he says, "that Shakespeare's Sonnets 
express his own feelings in his own person." It is 
true that the autobiographical interpretation, driven 
too far, has assumed all kinds of extravagant forms ; 
and poetical metaphors have been forced to prove that 
Shakespeare was lame, that there was an attempt to 
assassinate him, and so forth. But these Sonnets, by 
general consent, were private documents; they were 
not intended by Shakespeare for our perusal, but were 
addressed to individuals. To say that they do not 



88 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

"express his own feelings in his own person," is as 
much as to say that they are not sincere. And every 
lover of poetry who has once read the Sonnets knows 
this to be untrue. It is not chiefly their skill that 
takes us captive, but the intensity of their quiet 
personal appeal. By virtue of this they hold their 
place with the greatest poetry in the world ; they are 
rich in metaphor and various in melody, but these 
resources of art have been subdued to the feeling that 
inspires them, and have given us poems as simple and 
as moving as the pleading voice of a child. 

All who love poetry love it because in poetry the 
profoundest interests of life are spoken of directly, 
nakedly, and sincerely. No such habitual intimacy of 
expression is possible in daily speech. In poetry it is 
possible, because the forms and conventions and re- 
straints of art give dignity and quiet to the turbulent 
feelings on which they are imposed, and make passion 
tolerable. Without the passion there is no poetry ; to 
recognise great poetry is to hear the authentic voice. 
Poetry is a touchstone for insincerity ; if any one does 
not feel that which he desires to express, he may make 
a passable oration ; he will never make a great poem. 

No one whose opinion need be considered will main- 
tain that Shakespeare's Sonnets are destitute of feeling. 
Some, whose opinions claim respect, maintain that the 
feeling which inspires them has nothing to do with 
their ostensible occasions ; that they are free exercises 
of the poetic fancy, roaming over the dramatic possi- 
bilities of life, and finding deep expression for some of 
its imagined crises. Those who hold this view have 
not taken the trouble to explain how some of the 
sonnets came to be addressed or sent to any one. If 
it was a patron who received all these protests of in- 
alterable and unselfish devotion, couched in language 



III.] BOOKS AND POETRY 8& 

Tvhicli, ever since, has been consecrated to pure love, 
would he readily understand that these were the 
flatteries of a client, skilled in verse and lost to self- 
respect, hungry for favours to come ? Might he not 
take the poet at his word, and make embarrassing 
inroads upon the time and energies of a busy man ? 
Among the private friends who were favoured with 
these " sugar'd sonnets," what lady was it who took 
pleasure in so dramatic a compliment, so free an exer- 
cise of the poetic fancy, as this — 

For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright, 
Who art as black as hell, as dark as night ? 

If the sonnets were never sent, how did Thorpe get 
hold of them? If they were circulated among dis- 
interested lovers of poetry, would not some of them, 
which deal not with general themes, but with personal 
relations quite inadequately explained, be as unintel- 
ligible to contemporary readers as they are to us ? 
These are not self-contained poems, like Daniel's 
sonnet on Sleep, or Sidney's sonnet on the Moon; 
they are a commentary on certain implied events. If 
the events had no existence, and the sonnets are 
semi-dramatic poems, it is surely essential to good 
drama that the situation should be made clear. More- 
over, the sonnet-form was used by the Elizabethans, 
who followed their master Petrarch, exclusively for 
poems expressive of personal feeling, not for vague 
dramatic fantasies. The greater poets — Sidney, 
Spenser, Drayton — reflect in their sonnets the events 
of their own history. Shakespeare's sonnets are more 
intense than these ; and less explicable, if they be 
deprived of all background and occasion in fact. Like 
Sidney, Shakespeare is always protesting against the 
misreading which would reduce his passion to a mere 



90 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

convention. He desires to be remembered not for bis 
style, but for his love. He disclaims the stock figures 
of the conventional sonneteers 

And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare 
As any she belied with false compare. 

He does not fear homely metaphor ; and none of the 
sonnets is more convincing in its pathos than that in 
which he compares himself to an infant, set down 
by its mother, while she chases one of the feathered 
creatures that has escaped from the fowl-yard . 

So runn'st thou after that which flies from thee, 
Whilst I thy babe chase thee afar behind ; 
But if thou catch thy hope, turn back to me, 
And play the mother's part, kiss me, be kind. 

The situations shadowed are unlike the conventional 
situations described by the tribe of sonneteers, as the 
hard-fought issues of a law-court are unlike the formal 
debates of the Courts of Love. Some of them are 
strange, wild, and sordid in their nature : themes not 
chosen by poetry, but choosing it, and making their 
mark on it by the force of their reality. All poetry, 
all art, observes certain conventions of form. These 
poems are sonnets. There is nothing else conventional 
about them, except their critics. 

The facts which underlie them, and give to some of 
them their only possible meaning, cannot, save in the 
vaguest and most conjectural fashion, be reconstructed. 
The names of the persons involved are lost. Two 
of these persons are described, a beautiful wanton 
youth, and a dark faithless woman. With one or 
other of these two characters most of the sonnets, if 
not all of them, are concerned. The story that unrolls 
itself, too dimly to be called dramatic, too painfully to 



III.] BOOKS AND POETRY 91 

be mistaken for the pastime of a courtly fancy, is a 
story of passionate friendship, of vows broken and 
renewed, of love that triumphs over unkinduess, of 
lust that is a short madness and turns to bitterness 
and remorse. The voice of the poet is heard in many 
tones, now pleading with his friend, now railing against 
the woman that has ensnared him ; here a hymn of 
passionate devotion, there a strain of veiled innuendo 
— clear-sighted, indecent, cynical. The discourse 
passes, by natural transitions, from the intimacies of 
love and friendship to those other feelings, not less 
intimate and sincere, but now grown pale by contrast 
with the elemental human passions : the poet's hope 
of fame, or his sense of degradation in ministering to 
the idle pleasures of the multitude. The workings of 
his mind are laid bare, and reveal him, in no surprising 
light, as subject to passion, removed by the width of 
the spheres from those prudent and self-contained 
natures whom he has sketched with grave irony in 
the ninety -fourth sonnet: 

They that have power to hurt, and will do none, 
That do not do the thing they most do show, 
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone, 
Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow: 
They rightly do inherit heaven's graces 
And husband Nature's riches from expense ; 
They are the lords and owners of their faces, 
Others but stewards of their excellence. 

It would help us but little to know the names of the 
beautiful youth and the dark woman ; no public records 
could reflect even faintly those vicissitudes of experi- 
ence, exultations and abysses of feeling, which have 
their sole and suf&cient record in the Sonnets. 

Poetry is not biography; and the value of the 
Sonnets to the modern reader is independent of all 



92 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

knowledge of their occasion. That they were made 
from the material of experience is certain: Shake- 
speare was not a puny imitative rhymster. But the 
processes of art have changed the tear to a pearl, which 
remains to decorate new sorrows. The Sonnets speak to 
all who have known the chances and changes of human 
life. Their occasion is a thing of the past; their theme 
is eternal. The tragedy of which they speak is the topic 
and inspiration of all poetry ; it is the triumph of Time, 
marching relentlessly over the ruin of human ambitions 
and human desires. It may be read in all nature and 
in all art ; there are hints of it in the movement of the 
dial-hand, in the withering of flowers, in the wrinkles 
on a beautiful face ; it comes home with the harvests 
of autumn, and darkens hope in the eclipses of the sun 
and moon ; the yellowing papers of the poet and the 
crumbling pyramids of the builder tell of it ; it speaks 
in the waves that break upon the shore, and in the 
histories that commemorate bygone civilisations. All 
things decay ; the knowledge is as old as time, and as 
dull as philosophy. But what a poignancy it takes 
from its sudden recognition by the heart : 

Then of thy beauty do I question make, 
That thou among the wastes of time must go. 

The poet considers all expedients that promise defence 
against the tyrant, or reprieve from his doom. With 
a magniloquence that is only half-hearted he promises 
his friend a perpetuity of life " where breath most 
breathes, even in the mouths of men." But he knows 
this to be a losing game ; the monuments and memorials 
that have been erected against the ravages of Time 
are of no effect, save to supply future ages with new 
testimonies to his omnipotence. It is best to make 
terms with the destroyer, and, while submitting to 



III.] BOOKS AND POETRY 93 

him, to cheat him of the fulness of his triumph by 
handing on the lamp of life : 

For nothing 'gainst Time's scythe can make defence, 
Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence. 

This is a mitigation and a postponement of the uni- 
versal doom, but it gives no sure ground for defiance. 
In the last resort the only stronghold against the 
enemy is found in the love which is its own reward, 
which consoles for all losses and disappointments, which 
is not shaken by tempests nor obscured by clouds, 
which is truer than the truth of history, and stronger 
than the strength of corruption. Love alone is not 
Time's fool. So the first series of the Sonnets comes 
to an end 5 and there follows a shorter series, some of 
them realistic and sardonic and coarse, like an anti- 
Masque after the gracious ceremonial Masque of the 
earlier numbers. In this series is painted the history 
of lust, its short delights, its violence, its gentler inter- 
ludes, its treachery, and the torments that reward it. 
There is little relief to the picture ; the savage deceits 
of lust work out their own destiny, and leave their 
victim enlightened, but not consoled : 

Tor I have sworn thee fair ; more perjured I, 
To swear against the truth so foul a lie ! 

The Poems of Shakespeare in no way modify that 
conception of his character and temper which a dis- 
cerning reader might gather from the evidence of the 
plays. But they let us hear his voice more directly, 
without the intervening barrier of the drama, and they 
furnish us with some broken hints of the stormy trials 
and passions which helped him to his knowledge of 
the human heart, and enriched his plays with the 
fruits of personal experience. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE THEATRE 

In the Sonnets Shakespeare gave expression to his 
own thoughts and feelings, shaping the stuff of his 
experience by the laws of poetic art, to the ends of 
poetic beauty. In the drama the same experience of 
life supplied him with his material, but the conditions 
that beset him were more complex. When he came 
to London he had his way to make. " Lowliness is 
young ambition's ladder," and the only way to success 
was by conforming to the prevalent fashions and 
usages. Later, when he had won success, he was 
free to try new experiments and to modify custom. 
But he began as an apprentice to the London stage; 
his early efforts as a playwright cannot be truly 
judged except in relation to that stage ; and even his 
greatest plays show a careful regard for the strength 
and weakness of the instruments that lay ready to his 
hand. The world that he lived in, the stage that he 
wrote for, these have left their mark broad on his plays, 
so that those critics who study him in a philosophi- 
cal vacuum are always liable to err by treating the 
fashions of his theatre as if they were a part of his 
creative genius. He was not a lordly poet who 
stooped to the stage and dramatised his song ; he 
was bred in the tiring-room and on the boards; he 
was an actor before he was a dramatist. 

94 



CHAP. IV.] THE THEATRE 95 

The dramatic opportunities of Stratford counted for 
something in his history. Primitive drama flourishes 
everywhere in children's games. The rural communi- 
ties of Elizabethan England did not leave the drama 
to children, but enlivened the festivals of the year 
with ancient plays and pastimes, which served to 
break the dull round of country life. The Morris 
dance was a kind of drama; Shakespeare knew it 
well, and alludes to Maid Marian and the hobby- 
horse. The rustic play of St. George has lasted in 
quiet districts down to our own day; Shakespeare 
had often been entertained by this uncouth kind of 
acting, and preserves memories of it in A Midsummer 
NigTifs Dream, or, better, in Lovers Ldbour^s Lost 
The pageant of the Nine Worthies, presented by the 
schoolmaster, the curate, the unlettered Costard, and 
the refined traveller from Spain, is a fair specimen of 
the dramatic art as it was practised in villages. The 
chief business of each actor is to dress himself up and 
explain in doggerel rhyme who he is. Sir Nathaniel, 
who is a foolish, mild man, and a good bowler, is 
something over-weighted with the part of Alexander. 
But he puts on his armour and speaks his lines : 

"When in the world I liv'd, I was the world's Commander ; 
By East, West, North, and South I spread my conquering 

might : 
My Scutcheon plain declares that I am Alisander. 

Here he is interrupted by Biron's jests, and, after a 
feeble attempt to regain the thread of his discourse 
by beginning all over again, he is driven off the stage 
by Costard. The whole pageant, so grievously flouted 
and interrupted, is probably a very close study from 
the life, down to its very speeches, which, being 
written by the schoolmaster, are full of classical 



96 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

allusion, and make some attempt at epigram. Another 
type of drama, more ambitious and poetic, was not 
hard to come at in Shakespeare's childhood. The 
cycles of Miracle Plays were still presented, in the 
early summer, by the trade-guilds of many towns ; and 
it may be that Shakespeare was taken by his father to 
see them at Coventry. But this is hardly likely, for 
his trivial allusions to them bear no witness to the 
deep impression which must have been made upon an 
imaginative child by that strange and solemn pageant, 
dragging its slow length along, and exhibiting in 
selected scenes the whole drama of man, his creation, 
his fall, and his redemption. 

Spectacles and diversions of this kind belonged to 
the age that was passing away, and had in them none 
of the intellectual excitement of a new movement. 
It was otherwise with the plays and interludes pre- 
sented by the companies of travelling players who 
certainly visited Stratford. These men belonged to 
the new order; their plays savoured of modern wit 
and modern classical enthusiasm. The manner of 
their performances is very exactly recorded by Shake- 
speare in A Midsummer Nighfs Dream. They would 
present themselves to the steward of a great house, 
or to the officer of a corporation, and submit a list 
of their pieces, with a request to be allowed to 
perform. Just as Hamlet compels the actors, on their 
arrival, to give him a specimen of their skill, so 
Philostrate, who is simply an Elizabethan Master of 
the Kevels, takes care, when the rustics come with 
their play, to hear it over before proposing it to his 
master. Then he recites to Theseus a list of the en- 
tertainments provided to beguile the time between 
supper and bed. The plays are all mythological in 
subject, after the newest mode. The battle with the 



IV.] THE THEATRE 97 

Centaurs, tlie death of Orpheus, the lament of the 
Muses, and last, the ever-memorable "tedious brief 
scene " of Py ramus and Thisbe, are the items on the 
bill. Theseus having made his choice, there is a 
flourish of trumpets; the Prologue enters, bespeaks 
the goodwill of the audience, presents to them each 
of the various characters who are to appear in the 
play, and, for their better understanding, briefly 
summarises the plot. Then he withdraws, taking 
with him Thisbe, the Lion, and Moonshine, who are 
not immediately required, while Py ramus and the 
Wall are left behind to begin the play. Thus were 
plays performed at the court of Duke Theseus of 
Athens ; thus also were they given in the town hall 
of Stratford, before the magistrates and citizens of 
the borough. The habit of introducing each character 
to the audience has persisted in those modern plays 
where the business of the drama is suspended in order 
that a popular player may make an effective entrance, 
and establish friendly personal relations with the audi- 
ence. The actors of Shakespeare's time were no more 
willing than their successors to lose themselves in the 
play. 

The true beginnings of the Elizabethan drama are 
to be found in these wandering companies of noble- 
men's servants. Even in Elizabeth's reign, a great 
country house, like Sir Christopher Hatton's at 
Holdenby in Northamptonshire, with its array of ten- 
ants and retainers, was a self-contained community; 
and the business of supplying merriment on festive 
occasions fell to those of the servants and dependants 
who had a.ny special skill or aptitude in the arts of 
music, dancing, and recitation. Originally these ama- 
teur actors and musicians were content with their 
occasional performances, and did not travel. But the 



98 SHAKESPEAKE [chap. 

decay of feudalism, which, is the key to most of the 
political and literary history of Tudor and Stuart 
times, explains the sudden good fortunes of the drama. 
The gradual disappearance of feudal tenures, the 
growth of towns, the enclosure of lands, the dissolu- 
tion of the monasteries — all these changes undermined 
the old life of the country, and made it impossible for 
noblemen to maintain their enormous retinue of ser- 
vants and beneficiaries. The literature of the sixteenth 
century resounds with the complaints of those who 
were thrown out of a livelihood, and with the not less 
bitter complaints of those who suffered at the hands 
of lawless and masterless men. Meantime, the court 
and the town offered new attractions and new op- 
portunities to gentle and simple alike. A story told 
in The Serving-Man^ s Comfort, a pamphlet of 1598,, 
puts the position in a nutshell. A certain Earl once 
presented himself at the court of King Henry viii.y 
clad in a jerkin of frieze and hose of country russet, 
with a following of a hundred and twenty men, all 
well horsed and gallantly furnished. The King re- 
proved him for his base and unseemly apparel. When 
he next came to court he wore a gown of black velvet,, 
the sleeves set with aglets of gold, a velvet cap with 
a feather and gold band, bordered with precious stones,. 
a suit of cloth of gold, and a girdle and hangers richly 
embroidered and set with pearl. He was attended, 
with one man and a page. " Now,'' said the King,, 
" you are as you should be ; but where is your goodly 
train of men and horse ? " " If it may like your Grace," 
answered the good Earl, throwing down his cap, " here 
is twenty men and twenty horse " ; then throwing 
off his gown, "here lies forty men and forty horse 
more"; and so he continued until, in the end, he 
offered the King a choice between the men and the 



IV.] THE THEATRE 99 

gay apparel. Buckingham in Henry VIIL expresses 

the same dilemma : 

O many- 
Have broke their backs with laying manors on them 
For this great journey. 

Here is an epitome of the Renaissance on its social 
side. Money was taken out of landed estates to be 
put into the chief speculative investment of that age, 
gorgeous personal attire. The yeoman's son turned 
adventurer and went to London. The servants of 
a noble house, if they could act and sing, made a 
profession of their pastime, and wandered over the 
country, ministering to the rapidly growing taste for 
pageants, interludes, and music. In London they 
found their best market. For many years they acted 
wherever they could find accommodation, in gardens, 
halls, and inn-yards. Then the opposition of the City 
authorities drove them outside the walls ; in the play- 
ing-fields of the suburbs they found it easy to attract 
a concourse of people ; about 1576 they erected two 
permanent enclosed stages in Finsbury Fields, and 
the Elizabethan drama had found its birthplace. 

It was with these companies of actors that Shake- 
speare from the first had to deal ; and already, before 
he knew them, they had attained a high degree of pro- 
ficiency in their business. They were encouraged by 
their own masters, applauded by the populace, and 
favoured by the Court. The history of Richard Tarl- 
ton, the most famous of Elizabethan comic actors, 
who died in 1588, shows that before Shakespeare's 
time diligent search was made for likely talent to 
reinforce the profession. Tarlton, according to Fuller's 
account, was born at Condover in Shropshire, and " was 
in the field, keeping his father's swine, when a servant 
of Robert, Earl of Leicester, passing this way to his 

LOfC. 



100 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

Lord's lands in his Barony of Denbighe, was so highly 
pleased with his happy unhappy answers, that he 
brought him to Court, where he became the most 
famous jester to Queen Elizabeth." The actors long 
retained the double position ; like his even more 
famous predecessor. Will Summer, Tarlton was a 
servant of Eoyalty, but, unlike Will Summer, he 
was also a professional actor, and catered for the 
public in the newly built theatres of London. The 
jesters were, without doubt, the bright particular 
stars of the companies to which they belonged, the 
most popular of the actors, and the best remunerated. 
They were able to entertain an audience without 
assistance from others and Tarlton's pipe and tabor, 
his monologues and impromptus and jigs, were the 
delight of the public at the time when Shakespeare 
came to London. One of these jigs, wherein each of 
the short verses was satirically directed at this or that 
member of the audience, has the refrain " So pipeth 
the crow. Sitting upon a wall, — Please one, and please 
all." This refrain is quoted by Malvolio in Twelfth 
Night, — " it is with me as the very true Sonnet is : Please 
one, and please all." When Tarlton died, Will Kemp, 
whom we know to have been the impersonator of 
Dogberry, succeeded almost at once to his place in 
popular favour, while only less famous than Kemp 
were Cowley, Armin, and many others. A good 
illustration of the extraordinary mimetic skill dis- 
played by these comic actors may be found in Twelfth 
Night, where the Clown, to deceive Malvolio in the 
prison, first assumes the voice of the parson, Sir 
Topas, aiM then carries on a dialogue, in two voices, 
between the parson and himself. The same clown 
contributes almost all of the exquisite songs, romantic 
and comic, which fill the play with music. 



IV.] THE THEATRE lUi 

The question of the mixture of Tragedy and 
Comedy in the Elizabethan drama is therefore very 
simple : it was a question not of propriety and classical 
precedent, but of necessity. The people would have 
their favourites ; and when the old variety entertain- 
ments of the early London stages gave place to serious 
drama, room had to be made for the most famous 
actors. If Shakespeare held any high and dry theories 
of the drama, his thoughts can only have been a pain 
to him. He made a virtue of necessity, and in some 
of his plays — The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, 
Twelfth Night, King Lear — he gave a magnificent 
largess to the professional clown. But there are not 
wanting signs that he was troubled by the exorbi- 
tance of his comedians, who had climbed into popular 
favour by their jests and ditties, their grimaces and 
impromptus. " Let those that play your clowns," 
says Hamlet, "speak no more than is set down for 
them: for there be of them, that will themselves 
laugh, to set on some quantity of barren spectators 
to laugh too, though in the meantime some necessary 
question of the play be then to be considered : that's 
villainous, and shows a most pitiful ambition in the 
fool that uses it." It is not likely that this counsel 
of perfection was observed by the actors. Some of 
the tags spoken at the close of scenes by the Pool in 
King Lear are directed at the audience, and are 
quite irrelevant and worthless; these are either 
unlicensed interpolations which have crept into the 
text, or a contemptuous alms thrown to the Fool, 
to be spoken when, being alone upon the stage, he 
could do but little hurt to the necessary business 
of the play. In some of the plays the Fool is 
isolated, to avoid the risk of his interference. Peter, 
in Romeo and Juliet, is free to disport himself with the 



102 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

musicians downstairs, or to attend the Nurse in 
Juliet's absence. The Clown in Othello has so poor 
a part, in a single scene with Cassio, that a comic 
actor of ability could hardly be expected to refrain 
from eking it out with invention. The Porter in 
Macbeth gets the like hard measure ; he is not allowed 
to play the fool anywhere but at his own gate. 
Shakespeare was often severe with his clowns ; and 
it is plain that he recognised those advantages of 
tragic simplicity which were sometimes denied to him 
by the very conditions of his work. 

"When the first regular theatres were built, they 
were used not only for the playing of interludes, but 
for all those activities which had previously been dis- 
played either on raised scaffolds or within improvised 
spaces in the fields. The citizens delighted in exhibi- 
tions of juggling, tumbling, fencing, and wrestling; 
and these also were provided by the drama. Shake- 
speare is profuse in his concessions to the athletic 
interest. The wrestling-match in As Tou Like It, the 
rapier duels in Romeo and Juliet and in Hamlet, the 
broadsword fight in Macbeth, — these were real displays, 
of skill by practised combatants. The whole First 
Act of Coriolanus is so full of alarums and excursions 
and hand-to-hand fighting, with hard blows given. 
and taken, that it is tedious to Shakespeare's modern 
admirers, but it gave keen pleasure to the patrons of 
the Globe. The Comedy of Errors is noisy with beatings 
and the outcries of the victims. All these things, 
though it discolour the complexion of his greatness ta 
acknowledge it, were imposed upon Shakespeare by 
the tastes and habits of his patrons and by the fashions 
of the primitive theatre. It was on this robust stock 
that his towering thought and his delicate fancy were 
grafted. 



IV.] THE THEATRE 103 

When lie first arrived in London, the drama was at 
the crisis of its early history. Acting had flourished, 
throughout the reign of Elizabeth, in many places and 
in the most diverse kinds. The performance of plays 
written in imitation of Seneca for tragedy, and of 
Plautus for comedy, had the approval of scholars, and 
was a recognised entertainment at the universities and 
the Inns of Court. In still higher circles, comedies 
based on mythological and classical themes were acted 
chiefly by companies of singing boys — the Children of 
Paul's or the Children of the Chapel Koyal. The 
native comic tradition was unbroken from the earliest 
times, and even in these courtly comedies room was 
made for the antics of the Vice and the Clown. But 
tragedy was a new thing in England, little understood, 
and not much relished. It had found the dreariest of 
models in Seneca, who values tragic situation only as 
a peg on which to hang the commentaries of a teacher 
of rhetoric and philosophy. The first English tragedy, 
Gorboduc, is an academic debate on certain problems 
of conduct arising out of an ancient story ; and the 
same Senecan model was placidly followed by Samuel 
Daniel and Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, long after 
the rise of the newer school. But for the accident of 
genius, tragedy in England might have continued as 
an imitative exercise, practised chiefly by argumenta- 
tive philosophers. 

What happened is so well known that it has almost 
lost its wonder. A band of young men from the 
universities threw away their academic pride, and 
invaded the popular stages, which had hitherto been 
chiefly catered for by clowns and jugglers and players 
of short comic interludes. They were not scholars, 
in any strict sense of that word : Marlowe, Peele, 
Oreene, and Lodge belong to that numerous class 



104 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

who, in the words of Anthony a Wood, " did in a 
manner neglect academical studies." But they had 
been caught by the Latin poets, and were eager 
students of the new literature of the Renaissance in 
Italy, France, and Spain. In London, as at Oxford 
and Cambridge, the more regular avenues of prefer- 
ment were closed to them, and they were put to their 
shifts for a livelihood. To write for the booksellers, 
supplying them with poems, love-pamphlets, and 
translations, was the obvious resource ; the hard- 
earned gains of authorship might be handsomely 
increased by any one who was lucky enough to find 
a generous patron. But before they had been long 
in London they must have made acquaintance with a 
newly risen class of men, who lived at an easier rate. 
Those " glorious vagabonds," the stage-players, were 
conspicuous in the streets of the town, 

Sweeping it in their glaring satin suits, 
And pages to attend their masterships. 

Greene, in his Groatstvorth of Wit, tells how he was 
first invited to write for the stage. A player, mag- 
nificently dressed, like a gentleman of great living, 
overheard him repeating some verses, and offered him 
lodging and employment. The player, by his own 
account, was both actor and dramatic author. Besides 
playing the King of the Fairies, he had borne a 
part in The Twelve Labours of Hercules and in a piece 
called The Devil on the Highioay to Heaven, His 
own works were Morality plays, suitable for country 
audiences ; the two that he mentions were entitled 
The Moral of Man^s Wit and The Dialogue of Dives. 
But these educational plays, he said, had fallen out of 
esteem, and there was room for the newer inventions 
of a scholar. Greene went along with him; and. 



IV.] THE THEATRE 105 

lodging " at the town's end, in a house of retail," soon 
became famous as " an arch play-making poet," and 
learned to associate with the lewdest persons in the 
land. 

There is no reason to doubt the autobiographical 
truth of this account. But Greene was not the first, 
nor the greatest, of the innovators. The credit of 
transforming the popular drama belongs chiefly to 
Marlowe. Before his arrival Lyly had shown the way 
to make classical mythology engaging, and Peele had 
used blank verse so that it rang in the ear and dwelt 
in the memory. The work of these men was designed 
for select courtly circles, and left the wider public 
untouched. Marlowe appealed to the people. He 
brought blank verse on to the public stage and sent it 
echoing through the town. He proved that classical 
fable needs no dictionary to make it popular. Above 
all, he imagined great and serious actions, and created 
the heroic character. His play of Tamburlainey pro- 
duced about 1587, made subtle appeal to the national 
interests, to the love of adventure in far countries, 
and to the indomitable heart of youth. The success 
of this play is perhaps the greatest event in our literary 
history. It naturalised tragedy in England, and put 
an end, at a blow, to all the futilities of the theorists. 
More important still, it vindicated audacity, and taught 
poets to believe in the conquest of the world. Like 
all great and original works which catch the happy 
moment, it was multiplied in its echoes, and rapidly 
became a school. Marlowe's friends and fellows 
accepted his lead, recognised his triumph, and aban- 
doned their own less fortunate experiments to claim 
a share in his success. Kyd's Spanish Tragedy almost 
vied with Tamburlaine in popular favour, and the most 
extravagant ventures of Peele and Greene and Nashe 



106 SHAKESPEAKE [chap. 

were carried to victory on the same tide. While his 
companions imitated his earliest work Marlowe put it 
behind him, and advanced to new triumphs. During 
the few remaining years of his short life he produced 
Dr. Faustus, The Jew of Malta, and Edward II. — not to 
speak of his poems and unfinished plays. He died in 
1593, the year of the publication of Shakespeare's 
Venus and Adonis. 

During the last seven years or so of Marlowe's life 
Shakespeare was learning his business in London. Ko 
hint or fragment of a record remains to instruct us 
concerning his professional doings until near the end 
of this period. Many fanciful histories of these years 
have been written, rich in detail, built on guesses 
and inferences. The broad facts of the case have too 
often been hidden under these speculative structures ; 
and they are worth remembering, for though they lend 
themselves to no sectarian conclusions, and lead to 
no brilliant discoveries, they set a vague and half- 
obliterated picture in a true perspective. 

Shakespeare's beginnings were not courtly, but 
popular. He was plunged into the wild Bohemian 
life of actors and dramatists at a time when nothing 
was fixed or settled, when every month brought forth 
some new thing, and popularity was the only road to 
success. There was fierce rivalry among the companies 
of actors to catch the public ear. Tragedy acknow- 
ledged one man for master ; and a new school of actors 
was growing up to meet the demand for poetic decla- 
mation. Comedy, the older foundation, was unchanged, 
and remained in the hands of the professional jesters. 
!No new comic genius had arisen to share supremacy 
with Marlowe. Those who supplied the public with 
plays endeavoured to combine as many as possible of 
the resources of the stage in a single dramatic work. 



IV.] THE THEATRE 107 

Their reward was found in crowded theatres, not in 
literary reputation. Force, stridency, loud jesting and 
braggart declamation carried the day, and left no room 
for the daintiness of the literary conscience. The peo- 
ple, intoxicated with the new delight, craved inces- 
santly for fresh stimulants ; a play ran for but a few 
days, then it was laid aside and a new one was hastily 
put together out of any material that came to hand. 
History and fiction were ransacked for stories ; old 
plays were refurbished and patched with no regard 
to their authorship ; a play written by one man and 
found to be lacking in some element of popular suc- 
cess was altered and supplemented by another man. 
If Ben Jonson had made his first acquaintance with 
the stage at the time when Shakespeare came to Lon- 
don, he would probably have withdrawn in disgust 
from tlie attempt to impose dignity and order on this 
noisy, motley world; he would have sought refuge 
with the pedants and academicians, and the national 
drama would have lost him. Shakespeare accepted 
the facts, and subdued his hand to what it worked in. 
When he first comes into notice as a dramatist, in 
1592, he is accused by the dying Greene of gaining 
credit for himself by vamping the plays of better men. 
In the attempt to make mischief between his fellow- 
dramatists and Shakespeare, Greene uses language 
which proves that Shakespeare was in closer touch 
with the players than the University wits had ever 
been. " Yes, trust them not : for there is an upstart 
Crow, beautified with, our feathers, that with his 
Tiger's heart ivrapt in a Player's hide, supposes he is as 
well able to bumbast out a blank verse as the best of 
you : and being an absolute Johannes factotum, is in 
his own conceit the only Shakescene in a country." 
The line from Henry VI. which is liere parodied by 



108 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

Greene points his railing against that play, and gives 
us our first sure date in Shakespeare's dramatic history. 
If now we turn to the collection of Shakespeare's 
plays in the Folio, we find that the conditions under 
which his work was done are only too faithfully 
reflected in that volume. More than one or two of 
these plays, as they stand in the Folio, are, to put it 
bluntly, bad plays ; poor and confused in structure, or 
defaced with feeble writing. Some of them contain 
whole scenes written in Shakespeare's most splendid 
manner, and fully conceived characters drawn with all 
his vigour, while other scenes and other characters in 
the same play pass the bounds of inanity. There is 
an attractive simplicity about the criticism which 
attributes all that is good to Shakespeare, and all 
that is bad to " an inferior hand.'^ On this principle 
Titus Andronicus has been stoutly alleged to contain 
no single line of Shakespeare's composing. But if once 
we are foolishly persuaded to go behind the authority 
of Heminge and Condell (reinforced, in the case of 
Titus, by the testimony of Francis Meres), we have lost 
our only safe anchorage, and are afloat upon a wild and 
violent sea, subject to every wind of doctrine. No 
critical ear, however highly respected, can safely set 
itself up against the evidence of Shakespeare's friends. 
It is wiser to believe that the plays in the Folio were 
attributed to Shakespeare either because they were 
wholly his, or because they were recast and rewritten 
by him, or, lastly, because they contain enough of 
his work to warrant the attribution. Even so, there 
is a wide margin for conjecture, and the case would 
be desperate were it not for one significant consola- 
tion. None of the plays which have been shown to 
belong to the middle period of Shakespeare's career, 
including his maturer histories and comedies, and most 



IV.] THE THEATRE 109 

of the great tragedies, has ever been challenged. On 
the other hand, the plays of his early period, and a 
good many of those belonging to his later period from 
Macbeth and Timon onwards, are involved in contro- 
versy. The conclusions generally accepted by criticism 
may be broadly stated. At the beginning of his career 
Shakespeare made very free use of the work of other 
men, and, moreover, sometimes reshaped his own work, 
so that it is often difficult to assess the extent of his 
rights in the play as we have it. Towards the end 
of his career his work is once more found mixed 
with the work of other men, but this time there is 
generally reason to suspect that it is these others who 
have laid him under contribution, altering his com- 
pleted plays, or completing his unfinished work by 
additions of their own. Yet a third case of difficulty 
arises when a play which bears throughout the strong- 
est marks of Shakespeare's workmanship is disparate 
in its parts, and hangs ill together. Eurther questions 
spring from these. How far have we to reckon with 
willing collaboration, early and late ? Who were the 
authors of the anonymous plays that he used as the 
basis of some of his own early work ? To what extent 
were his dramas modified for representation on the 
stage during the years intervening between their first 
appearance and the publication of the Folio ; and in 
how many cases were these modified versions printed 
by the editors of the Eolio? 

To answer these questions in detail is the business 
of Shakespeare criticism. The results obtained by the 
most laborious scholars command no general assent, 
and depend, for the most part, on a chain of ingenious 
hypotheses. If marks of interrogation were inserted 
in all treatises on Shakespeare at all the points where 
modesty demands them, the syntax of these works 



110 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

would be sadly broken. To keep the mind open when 
there is no sufficient warrant for closing it is the rarest 
of human achievements. The difficult task shall here 
be attempted; and a few brief illustrations of the 
nature of these knotty problems must serve in place 
of a more ambitious edifice. 

Tlie Taming of the Shrew was first printed in the 
Folio. There are no contemporary references to it, 
and it contains no allusions which can be used to 
determine its date, but it has many of the charac- 
teristics of Shakespeare's early work. The plot is 
double, combining two stories from different sources. 
That part of the play which tells the story of Bianca 
and her lovers has, for very fiimsy reasons, been 
denied by some critics to Shakespeare. The scenes 
wherein Katherine and Petruchio appear are un- 
doubtedly his ; and these scenes are exactly modelled 
on an extant comedy of 1594, called Tlie Taming of a 
Shrew. This earlier play is hasty and vigorous in 
execution; it has not the full flow of Shakespeare's 
eloquence ; its language is rude in the comic parts, 
and the more serious speeches are written in a 
parody of the style of Marlowe, which, by some sly 
touches of exaggeration, is delightfully adapted to the 
purposes of comedy. The play is nevertheless a work 
of comic genius ; and contains, without exception, all 
the ludicrous situations which are the making of 
Shakespeare's comedy. The wild behaviour of Petru- 
chio at his wedding, the tantalising of the hungry bride 
with imaginary meats, and the riotous scene with the 
tailor, are essentially the same in both plays, and 
give occasion for many identical turns of wit. In the 
earlier play, as in the later, Katherine submits to her 
lord by accepting his opinion on the question of the 
sun and moon, and when he indulges his humour by 



IV.] THE THEATKE 111 

pretending that an old man is a young budding virgin, 
she falls in with his mad fancy and outgoes him in 
gaiety. " Fair Lady/' she says to the greybeard, 

Wrap up thy radiations in some cloud, 
Lest that thy beauty make this stately town 
Inhabitable, like the burning zone, 
"With sweet reflections of thy lovely face. 

Further, the whole business of the Induction and the 
humours of Christopher Sly are already full-grown in 
the earlier play, which contains some passages worthy 
of Shakespeare yet omitted in the later version. 
When the Duke, in the course of the action, orders 
two of the characters to be taken to prison. Sly wakes 
up, at the word, from his drunken sleep, and protests : 
" I say we '11 have no sending to prison." In vain the 
Lords remind him that this is but a play, acted in jest ; 
he is firm in his resolve : ^^ I tell thee, Sim, we '11 have 
no sending to prison, that's flat: why, Sim, am not 
I Don Christo Vary ? Therefore I say they shall not 
go to prison." When at last he is assured that they 
have run away, he is mollified, calls for some more 
drink, orders the play to proceed, and resumes his 
slumbers. 

If the Bianca scenes are not his, Shakespeare is 
thus left with nothing but a reviser's share in the 
stronger part of the play. But who wrote the play of 
1594 ? Among the authors who were then writing for 
the stage we know of only one man who was certainly 
capable of writing it, and that man is Shakespeare 
himself. If his authorship of it could be proved, it 
would be a document of the very highest value as 
a sample of the work that he did in his early time. 
In the absence of such proof, the assumption that he 
wrote it could only serve as a new sandy site for the 



112 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

fabric of conjecture. The play, whoever wrote it, 
helps us to a knowledge of the early London theatre. 
It is not much more than half as long as Shakespeare's 
later version, and was acted by the Earl of Pembroke's 
servants. Its author, writing at a time when the 
bragging blank verse of Marlowe had become the 
common theatrical jargon, yet shows himself conscious 
of the unfitness of these heroics for the portrayal of 
daily life, and gently topples them over into absurdity. 
He has a firm hold on reality, a rich store of colloquial 
speech, and a wonderful fertility in the invention of 
comic situation. In all these respects he resembles 
Shakespeare, who gradually freed himself from the 
influence of Marlowe and indulged his own more 
humane genius, until the style made fashionable by 
Marlowe's imitators is found at last, in Hamlet, to be 
fit only for the ranting speeches of the players, and 
the admiring criticism of Polonius. 

The questions that arise in connection with Shake- 
speare's later work may be well illustrated by the case 
of Timon of Athens. This play also occurs only in the 
Folio, and cannot be exactly dated. It is usually placed 
after the four great tragedies, and immediately before 
Antony and Cleopatra — that is to say, about the 
year 1607. In one respect it is utterly unlike these 
neighbours. There is no other play of Shakespeare's 
with so simple a plot. Timon of Athens is the exhibition 
of a single character in contrasted situations. Timon 
is rich and generous, which is matter for the Mrst Act ; 
his riches and his friends fail him in the Second and 
Third Acts ; he retires to a desert place outside the 
city, curses mankind, and dies, which climax is the 
theme of the Fourth and Fifth Acts. There is nothing 
in all Shakespeare's work more stupendous than the 
colossal figure of Timon, raining his terrible impreca- 



iv.] THE THEATRE 113 

tions on the littleness and falsehood of mankind. Yet 
the play as a whole is unsatisfying, because the cause 
is inadequate to produce the effect. iSTo one can read 
the play and believe that Shakespeare intended a 
satire on misanthropy: Timon's passion is heart- 
rending and awe-inspiring; desolation and despair 
never spoke with more convincing accents. Yet 
when we examine the events that lead up to the crisis, 
and the characters who are grouped around Timon, they 
seem like excuses and shadows, hastily sketched as 
a kind of conventional framework for the great central 
figure. The machinery is carelessly put together, and 
the writing, in these outlying parts of the play, is 
often flat. The critics have been busy with this case, 
and have called in the inevitable collaborator. Some 
of them generously allow Shakespeare two helpers 
(Rowley is always a useful supplementary name), and 
divide up the play line by line, assigning their exact 
portions to the lion, the ape, and the beast of burden. 
The problem is a very difficult one, and these con- 
jectures are ingenious, but have not led to a convincing 
result. They are vitiated by the superstition which 
refuses to assign to Shakespeare any hasty or careless 
work. Yet he was a purveyor to the public stage, 
and surely must have been pressed, as the modern 
journalist is pressed, to supply needed matter. 
Many authors who have suffered this pressure have 
settled their account with their conscience b}^ dividing 
their work into two kinds. Some of it they do frankly 
as journey-work, making it as good as time and circum- 
stances permit. The rest they keep by them, revising 
and polishing it to satisfy their own more exacting 
ideals. Shakespeare did both kinds of work, and the 
bulk of his writing has come down to us without 
distinction made between the better and the worse. 



114 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

This consideration should be kept in mind by those who 
profess ability to recognise his style. The style of an 
anthor and the changes in his style are fairly easy to 
recognise when we have to do only with a sequence of 
works carefully written, and put forth over his own 
name. The problem would be enormously compli- 
cated if his most careless talk and his most hurried 
business letters were included in the account. And 
the problem has been complicated in Shakespeare's 
case by the pressure of theatrical conditions. 

These conditions are visible in their results. There 
is good reason to think that many of his comedies are 
recasts of his own earlier versions, now lost to us. It 
is wrong to suppose that these earlier versions were 
revised from motives of literary pride. The early 
Taming of a Shrew and the first version of Hamlet 
point the way to a more likely conclusion. When the 
theatre came to its maturity, complete five-act plays, 
with two plots and everything handsome about them, 
were required to fill the afternoon. The earlier and 
slighter plays and interludes were then enlarged and 
adapted to the new demands. It was not easy, even 
for Shakespeare, to supply his best work, freshly 
wrought from fresh material, at the rate of two plays a 
year. For certain marvellous years he almost did it ; 
and, as likely as not, the effort killed him. The Vicar 
of Stratford says that he died of ' a drinking-bout, but 
a drinking-bout seldom gives more than a coup de 
grace. No man, not even one who was only a little 
lower than the angels, could live through the work that 
Shakespeare did, from Hamlet to Antony and Cleopatra, 
without paying for it in health. He must have bowed 
under the strain, "unless his nerves were brass or 
hammered steel." But the theatre, having devoured 
the products of his intense labour, was as hungry as 



IT.] THE THEATRE 115 

ever, and unremitting in its demands. In Timon of 
Athens we see how these demands were met. The 
close likeness between Timon and King Lear has often 
been noticed, so that it is not unfair to say that in 
King Lear Shakespeare treated the very theme of 
Timon, and treated it better, with all added circum- 
stances of likelihood. The passion of the lonely old 
king on the heath passes by degrees into the fiercest 
misanthropy, but it carries our sympathy with it, for 
we have watched it from its beginning, and have been 
made to feel the cruelty of the causes that provoked it. 
After King Lear, nothing new could be made of the 
same figure in a weaker setting. But if, as seems 
likely, Timon is a first sketch of King Lear, set aside 
unfinished because the story proved intractable and no 
full measure of sympathy could be demanded for its 
hero, the position is explained. Shakespeare, the 
artist, had no further use for Timon ; Shakespeare, the 
popular playwright, laid his hand on the discarded 
fragment of a play, and either expanded it himself, or, 
more probably, permitted another to expand it, to the 
statutory bulk of five acts. 

This conclusion might be strengthened by several 
parallel instances, which justify us in believing that 
Shakespeare sometimes made more than one attempt 
at the treatment of a dramatic theme, and that his 
failures, so to call them, were subsequently pieced out 
with other matter, to meet the demands of the theatre. 
One instance must suffice. Incomparably the most 
popular love-story of the earlier sixteenth century was 
the story of Troilus and Cressida. To a young man 
seeking for a dramatic subject this theme couid not fail 
to occur. It is handled by Shakespeare in one of his 
later plays, which was printed in 1609, and had been 
acted, before that time, at the Globe theatre. The 



116 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

play of Troilus and Cressida is the despair of all critics 
who seek in it for nnity of purpose or meaning. It 
is a bad play, crowded with wonders and beauties. 
The love-story is written, for the most part, in the 
style of Romeo and Juliet and the early comedies, 
with many similar phrases and jests. The political 
parts are in Shakespeare's full-armonred mature style, 
laden with thought, and richly decorated with elo- 
quence. Love and politics are made to engage our 
ardent sympathies in turn, without any interaction, 
and are both turned to mockery by a chorus of 
sensualist and cynic, Pandarus and Thersites. The 
general impression left by the play is unpleasant only 
because it is hopelessly confused. The lyrical rapture 
of Troilus and the resonant wisdom of Ulysses are not 
effectively put to shame ; they rise here and there above 
the din of traffickers and brawlers ; but the play is not 
theirs ; they cry out in the market-place, and no man 
regards them. Dryden comments on the faults in- 
herent in the play, and states that Shakespeare com- 
posed it '^ in the apprenticeship of his writing." It is 
not credible that the speeches of Ulysses belong to 
this early time. On the other hand, it is hard to 
believe that the love-passages of the Third Act, which 
are untouched by the spirit of satire, and show 
Cressida pure and simple, were written after Romeo 
and Juliet — a mere repetition. In the absence of 
any other intelligible theory, it may be surmised 
that Shakespeare at first took np Chaucer's story 
with the intent of making it into a tragedy. But 
the story is not outwardly tragic ; the chief persons, as 
Dryden remarks, are left alive ; and the events of their 
history were too notorious to be altered by a play- 
wright. Chaucer in his long narrative poem achieves 
the impossible 5 he keeps the reader in sympathy with 



IV.] THE THEATRE 117 

the love-lorn Troilus, with, the faithless Cressicia, and 
with his own reflections on the vanity of earthly 
desire. These are the miracles of a story-teller; they 
may well have misled even Shakespeare, until he tried 
to transfer them to the stage, and found that the 
history of Troilus and Cressida is not a fit theme for a 
lyrical love-drama. He wrote Romeo and Juliet instead, 
and retained the go-between in the character of the 
Nurse, who is twin-sister to Pandarus even in tricks of 
speech, and derives from the same great original. 
Later on, when a play was required, and the time was 
short, he chose the romance of Troy, in its larger 
aspects, as the theme of a political drama, and eked it 
out with the earlier incomplete play. The failure and 
miscarriage of everything through human lust and 
human weakness is the only principle of coherence in 
the composite play, and accordingly Thersites is its 
hero. Yet Thersites is made odious ; so that we are 
left with the impression that the author, after mocking 
at love and war and statecraft, mocks also at his own 
disaffection. In no other instance does he come so 
near to the restlessness of egotism ; but his poetry is 
irrepressible ; in single passages the play is great, and 
by these it is remembered. 

All this doubtful speculation as to the genesis of 
particular plays may be fairly dispensed with in con- 
sidering the works of Shakespeare's prime. At an 
early period of his career he attached himself to the 
Lord Chamberlain's company of players, which on the 
accession of James i. became the King's company, and 
he seems to. have remained constant to it thereafter. 
For this company the Globe theatre was built on the 
Bankside in 1599 ; as the Fortune theatre in Cripple- 
gate was built, at about the same time, for their chief 
rivals, the Lord Admiral's company. There can be no 



118 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

doubt that Shakespeare was, from the first, in high 
authority at the Globe. The date of its building 
coincides with the beginning of his greatest dramatic 
period, when he abandoned the historical and comic 
themes which had won him popularity, and set himself 
to teach English tragedy a higher flight. His tragedies 
and Eoman plays, it is safe to assume, were brought out 
at this theatre under his own supervision ; the actors 
were probably instructed by himself ; the very build- 
ing was possibly designed for his requirements. The 
plays of his maturity were therefore produced, as few 
dramatists can hope to see their plays produced, in 
exact conformity with the author's intentions. His 
chief tragic actor, Eichard Burbage, to judge from 
those faint echoes of opinion which are an actor's 
only memorial, was among the greatest of English 
tragedians, and at least had this inestimable advantage 
over Betterton and Garrick, that the author was at 
hand to offer criticism and counsel. We know enough 
of Shakespeare's views on acting to be sure that an 
unfamiliar quiet reigned at the Globe; the aspiring 
tragedian was taught to do his roaring gently ; the 
strutting player, — 

Whose conceit 
Lies in his hamstring, and doth think it rich 
To hear the wooden dialogue and sound 
'Twixt his stretch'd footing and the scaffoldage, — 

was subdued to a more temperate behaviour ; and the 
poetry of the long speeches was recited, as it has not 
very often been recited since, with care given first to 
melody and continuity of discourse. 

The stage at these early theatres was a raised bare 
platform, jutting out some considerable distance among 
the audience, so that the groups of players were seen 
from many points of view, and had to aim at statuesque 



IV.] THE THEATRE 119 

rather than pictorial effect. The central part of the 
theatre, into which the stage protruded, was unroofed ; 
and plays were given by the light of day. There was 
no painted scenery. At the back of the stage a wooden 
erection, hollow underneath, and hung with some kind 
of tapestry, served many purposes. It was Juliet's 
tomb, and the canopy of Desdemona's bed, and the 
hovel where poor Tom in Lear is found taking refuge 
from the storm. The top of the structure was used as 
occasion demanded, for the battlements of Flint Castle 
in Richard II., or for the balcony in Romeo and Juliet, 
or for the window in Shylock's house whence Jessica 
throws the casket, or for Cleopatra's monument, to 
which the dying Antony is raised to take his farewell 
of Egypt. No women appeared on the public stage, 
and the parts of women were taken by boys. This 
last is perhaps the most startling feature in the usage 
of the Elizabethan stage. When Cleopatra describes 
the ignominy of being led to Eome, she alludes to it : 

The quick comedians 
Extemporally will stage us, and present 
Our Alexandrian revels : Antony 
Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see 
Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness 
I' the posture of a whore. 

It is strange to remember that a boy spoke these lines. 
And the same irony of situation must surely have be- 
come almost dangerous in the speech of Volumnia, the 
Roman matron : 

Think with thyself, 
How more unfortunate than all living women 
Are we come hither. 

So too with Shakespeare's favourite device of put- 
ting his heroines into boy's dress. The boys who 



120 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

acted Eosalind, Viola, and Julia, had the difficult 
task of pretending to be girls disguised as boys. 
In spite of all this, it may be doubted whether 
Shakespeare has not suffered more than he has gained 
by the genius of latter-day actresses, who bring into 
the plays a realism and a robust emotion which some- 
times obscure the sheer poetic value of the author's 
conception. The boys were no doubt very highly 
trained, and amenable to instruction ; so that the 
parts of Eosalind and Desdemona may well have 
been rendered with a clarity and simplicity which 
served as a transparent medium for the author's wit 
and pathos. Poetry, like religion, is outraged when 
it is made a platform for the exhibition of their own 
talent and passion by those who are its ministers. 
With the disappearance of the boy-players the poetic 
drama died in England, and it has had no second life. 
The effects of the poetic imagination are wrought 
largely by suggestion ; and the bare stage, by sparing 
the audience a hundred irrelevant distractions, helped 
poetry to do its work. Besides poetry, the resources 
that lay to Shakespeare's hand were costume, gesture, 
dramatic grouping of the actors, procession, music, 
dancing, and all kinds of bodily activity. The rude 
architectural background supplied by the stage was 
not felt to be insufficient ; much of the business of 
life was transacted by Elizabethans, as it still is by 
Orientals, " in an open place." Costume was something 
more than idly decorative ; it was a note of rank, 
profession, or trade, and so helped to tell the story. 
The necessary outlay on costume was the heaviest 
part of theatrical expense, and the chief actors were 
furnished with a varied and splendid wardrobe. 
Shakespeare's plays are written with unfailing care for 
these externals. He entertained the spectators with 



IV.] THE THEATRE 121 

unceasing movement, and a feast of colours, and the 
noise of trumpets and cannon and shouting, and end- 
less song and dance. Sometimes a whole scene is given 
over to pageantry, like that scene in As You Like It, 
where Jaques and the Lords, clad as foresters, bear 
the deer in triumph, and crown the conqueror with 
the deer's horns. They form a procession, and pass 
round the stage, singing a lusty song : 

Take thou no scorn to wear the Iiorn ; 
It was a crest ere thou wast born. 

The horn was a jest long before the time of Shakespeare, 
and he took no scorn to repeat it everlastingly, for the 
delight of a simple-minded audience. But the chief 
purpose of the scene is explained by Jaques, who calls 
for the song, and adds : " 'Tis no matter how it be in 
tune, so it make noise enough." 

The vigilance of Shakespeare's stage-craft may be 
best seen by an illustration. In the Second Act of 
Julius Caesar the conspiracy against Caesar is hatched. 
The act opens with the appearance of Brutus, who 
comes into his orchard to call for his servant. We are 
to know that it is night, and we are told at oncej 
Brutus speaks of the progress of the stars, and, being 
unable to sleep, orders a light to be set in his study. 
His servant, returning, brings him a paper, found in 
the study-window ; it is a message from the conspira- 
tors, and he opens it and reads it. But we are not to 
forget that it is dark, and he explains : 

The exhalations whizzing in the air 

Give so much light that I may read by them. 

From the talk of Brutus and his servant we have 
learned that it is the night before the Ides of March, 
that Brutus is sleepless and troubled, and that the air 
is full of portents. Before this talk is ended, it may be 



122 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

assumed that a hush has fallen upon the audience ; the 
murmur of voices and the cracking of nuts have 
ceased. Then comes a knocking at the gate, and 
Cassius is admitted with his fellow-conspirators, who 
wear their hats plucked about their ears, and are so 
muf&ed up that Brutus cannot identify them. He is 
introduced to them, one by one, and Cassius draws him 
aside for a long whimpered colloquy. Meantime the 
others discuss the points of the compass : 

Decius. Here lies the East : doth not the day break here ? 

Casca. No. 

Cinna. O, pardon, Sir, it doth ; and yon grey lines, 

That fret the clouds, are messengers of day. 
Casca. You shall confess that you are both deceiv'd: 

Here, as I point my sword, the Sun arises, 

Which is a great way growing on the South, 

Weighing the youthful season of the year. 

Some two months hence up higher toward the North 

He first presents his fire, and the high East 

Stands, as the Capitol, directly here. 

The muffled figures are grouped at one corner of the 
protruding stage, behind Casca, who points at the 
imagined Capitol with his sword. Brutus and Cassius 
watch them, and the dramatic group breaks up at a 
word from Brutus : 

Give me your hands all over, one by one. 

Then follows a discussion of the plot against Caesar, 
until the clock strikes three, and the conspirators part. 
Brutus, left alone, finds that his servant has gone to 
sleep. The whole scene is heavy with the sense of 
night and the darkness of conspiracy, yet the effect is 
produced by nothing but the spoken words and the 
gestures of the players. 

Not only was Shakespeare's stage bare, but the story 



IV.] THE THEATRE 123 

of the play was often unknown beforehand to his 
audience. The background and environment of his 
principal characters had to be created in the imagina- 
tion of the spectators, worked upon and excited by 
his poetry. His opening scenes are therefore all- 
important ; besides explaining preliminaries they often 
strike the keynote of the whole play. Twelfth Night, a 
play compact of harmony, opens with the strains of 
music ; and, when the music ceases, the wonderful 
speech of the Duke, on love and imagination, is a 
summary of all that follows. In Romeo and Juliet, 
before either of the lovers is heard of, we witness 
a quarrel between the servants of the rival houses. 
The first words spoken in Hamlet are a challenge 
to the sentry who guards the royal castle of Elsinore ; 
Macbeth begins with a thunderstorm, and rumours 
of battle, and the ominous tryst of the witches. Not 
less wonderful than these is the opening of Othello ; 
the subdued voices, talking earnestly in the street, of 
money, and preferment, and ancient grudges, are the 
muttering of the storm which breaks with tropical 
violence in the sudden night-alarm, and is lulled into 
quiet again in the Council Chamber of the Duke. But 
this cloud is only the vanguard of the darkness that is 
to follow, and of the winds that are to blow till they 
have wakened death. The development of Shake- 
speare's greater plays is curiously musical in its logic ; 
the statement and interweaving of the themes, the varia- 
tions and repetitions, the quiet melodies that are heard 
in the intervals, and the gradual increase of complexity 
until the subtle discourse of the earlier scenes is 
swallowed up in the full blare of the reunited orchestra 
— all this ordered beauty w^as made possible by the 
strict subordination of stage effects to the needs and 
the methods of poetry. 



124 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

No detail of the business of a playwright escaped 
his attention. His management of entrances deserves 
careful study. The actors came on at the back of the 
stage, and had some way to go before they could begin 
to speak. He allows time for this, and " Look where 
he comes " — the common formula of introduction — is 
usually spoken by one of the characters who is drawn 
a little aside, watching another come forward. So in 
Othello, when lago's poison has begun to work : 

lago. Look where lie comes. Not poppy, nor mandragora, 
Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world, 
Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep 
Which thou ow'dst yesterday. 

This superb incantation is uttered by the high-priest of 
evil over the unconscious Othello as he comes moodily 
down the stage. Many modern editions of Shakespeare 
postpone the entrance of Othello until lago's speech is 
finished, whereby they ruin the dramatic effect. The 
habitual shifting of the entrances to suit the require- 
ments of the modern stage, where most of the 
characters must come on from the wings, is an evil 
departure from the old copies, and a wrong done to 
Shakespeare. On his platform stage he often intro- 
duces independent groups of actors, and makes one 
group serve as a commentary on the other. At the 
beginning of Antony mid Cleopatra Demetrius and Philo 
are discussing the dotage of their great general. There 
is a flourish ; Antony and Cleopatra, with their trains, 
and eunuchs fanning her, come slowly down the stage 
on the other side. Then Philo continues : 

Look where they come. 
Take but good note, and you shall see in him 
The triple pillar of the world transform'd 
Into a strumpet's fool : behold and see. 



IV.] THE THEATRE 125 

By this time the procession has come forward and we 
overhear the talk of the lovers. Throughout the 
scene Demetrius and Philo have no share in the action ; 
they stand aside and play the part of a chorus ; their 
conversation interprets to the audience the meaning of 
what is going forward on the stage. 

Where the action is so complex as it commonly is 
in Shakespeare's plays, a great part of it must neces- 
sarily be set forth in report or narration. He divides 
the ancient functions of the messenger, like those 
of the chorus, among the characters of the play. 
Many of his most memorable scenes — the wedding of 
Petruchio, the death of Ophelia, the interview of 
Hotspur, on the field of battle, with the popinjay 
lord, — are narrated, not exhibited. Yet for all his use 
of this indirect method, Shakespeare puts too much 
on his stage, and sometimes violates the modesty of 
art. To his audience he must have seemed notable 
for restraint ; they were inured to horrors ; and he 
gave them no hangings, and no slow deaths by torture. 
Titus Andronicus may be left out of the account, as 
a work of youthful bravado. But the blinding of 
Gloucester on the stage, though casuistry has been 
ready to defend it, cannot be excused. This is the 
chief of his offences ; in comparison with this the 
bringing in of the hot irons, in King John, and the 
murder of Macduff's young son, in Macbeth, are venial 
transgressions, which may be happily slurred over in 
the acting. 

The day for discussing the notorious unities in 
connection with Shakespeare's drama is long past. 
Romantic poetry created its own drama, and acknow- 
ledges no unity save that which is equally binding 
on a poem or a prose story — the unity of impression. 
Nowhere is the magic of Shakespeare's art greater 



126 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

than here. He reduces a wild diversity of means to 
a single purpose; and submits the wealth of his 
imagination and knowledge to be judged by this one 
test. His landscape, his moonlight and sunlight and 
darkness, his barren heaths and verdurous parks, are 
all agents in the service of dramatic poetry. " It is 
almost morning," says Portia, at the close of The Mer- 
chant of Venice, — and the words have an indescribable 
human value. When Claudio, in Much Ado, has paid 
his last tribute to the empty tomb of Hero, and all 
things are arranged for the final restoration of happi- 
ness, Don Pedro speaks : 

Good morrow, masters : put your torches out. 

The wolves have prey'd, and look, the gentle day, 
Before the wheels of Phoebus, round about 

Dapples the drowsy East with spots of grey. 

But the best instance of this alliance of poetry with 
the drama is to be found in As Tou Like It. The scene 
is laid, for the most part, in the forest of Arden. A 
minute examination of the play has given a curious 
result. No single bird, or insect, or flower, is men- 
tioned by name. The words " flower " and ^^ leaf " 
do not occur. The oak is the only tree. For animals, 
there are the deer, one lioness, and one green and 
gilded snake. The season is not easy to determine ; 
perhaps it is summer ; we hear only of the biting cold 
and the wintry wind. "But these are all lies,'^ as 
Eosalind would say, and the dramatic truth has been 
expressed by those critics who speak of "the leafy 
solitudes sweet with the song of birds.'' It is nothing 
to the outlaws that their forest is poorly furnished 
with stage-properties ; they fleet the time carelessly 
in a paradise of gaiety and indolence, and there is 
summer in their hearts. So Shakespeare attains his 



IV.] THE THEATRE 127 

end without the bathos of an allusion to the soft 
green grass, which must needs have been represented 
by the boards of the theatre. The critical actuaries 
are baffled, and find nothing in this play to assess ; 
Shakespeare's dramatic estate cannot be brought under 
the hammer, for it is rich in nothing but poetry. 



CHAPTER V 

STOKY AND CHARACTER 

In the Folio Shakespeare's work is divided into three 
kinds — Comedy, History, and Tragedy. The classifica- 
tion of the plays under these headings is artificial and 
misleading. Cymbeline appears among the Tragedies ; 
while Measure for Measure, a play much more tragic in 
temper, is numbered with the Comedies. Richard II. 
is a History ; Julius Caesar is a Tragedy. Troilus and 
Cressida, in consequence of some typographical mishap, 
was inserted, with the pages unnumbered, between the 
Histories and the Tragedies. 

The section headed Histories contains the historical 
plays dealing with English kings. This sort of play, 
the Chronicle History, flourished during the last 
fifteen years of Elizabeth's reign, and owed its popu- 
larity to the fervour of Armada patriotism. The newly 
awakened national spirit made the people quick to 
discern a topical interest in the records of bygone 
struggles against foreign aggression and civil dis- 
union. In writing plays of this kind Shakespeare 
was following the lead of others ; and the plays them- 
selves, because they are based to a large extent on 
earlier dramatic handlings of the same themes, and 
frequently sacrifice the truth of history to the exi- 
gencies of the drama, are a less faithful record of 
facts than the Eoman plays which derive solely from 
Plutarch. Doubtless where national memories were 

128 



CHAP, v.] STORY AND CHARACTER 129 

concerned, the audience at the theatre was content 
with a comparatively diffuse style of play ; and this 
looseness of structure, which is found in the weaker 
Histories, is the sole justification for the new name. 
But the threefold division has no value for dramatic 
criticism. The Histories were an accident of fashion, 
and claimed some measure of exemption, by virtue 
of their political interest, from the severer canons of 
art. At least they told a story, and the playgoers 
asked no more. 

Even the time-honoured distinction of Tragedy 
and Comedy gives no true or satisfying division of 
Shakespeare's plays. Othello is a tragedy ; As You 
Like It is a comedy : so much may be admitted. But 
between the most marked examples of the two kinds 
there is every degree and variety of tragic and comic 
interest, exhibited in rich confusion ; so that the plays 
might be best arranged on a graduated scale ; comedy 
shades into tragedy by imperceptible advances, and he 
would be a bold man who should presume to determine 
the boundary. The crude test of life or death gives 
no easy criterion ; in The Wiyiter^s Tale Mamillius, heir 
to the throne of Sicily, only son to Hermione, and one 
of the most delightful of Shakespeare's children, dies 
of grief and fear. Romeo and Juliet die, Troilus and 
Cressida survive. In some of the comedies the gravest 
infidelities and sufferings are lightly huddled up in a 
happy ending. Further, Shakespeare has no two 
styles for the two kinds of play. The echoes that 
pass from the one to the other would make a strange 
collection. Benedick and Hamlet speak the same 
tongue. " If a man do not erect in this age his own 
tomb ere he dies, he shall live no longer in monuments, 
than the bell rings and the widow weeps." So says 
jesting Benedick, at the height of his new-found 



130 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

happiness with Beatrice. " Oh Heavens ! " says 
Hamlet, in the bitterness of his soul, " die two months 
ago, and not forgotten yet? Then there's hope a 
great man's memory may outlive his life half a year : 
but by'r lady, he must build churches then, or else 
shall he suffer not thinking on, with the hobby-horse. '^ 
If Hamlet is a philosopher, so is Benedick. " Is it not 
strange," he says of music, '^ that sheeps' guts should 
hale souls out of men's bodies ? " Another of these 
echoes passes from Justice Shallow to King Lear. 
" 'Tis the heart. Master Page," says the thin-voiced 
little justice ; " 'tis here, 'tis here. I have seen the 
time, with my long sword, I would have made you four 
tall fellows skip like rats." How like to these are the 
words spoken by Lear, when he carries Cordelia dead 
in his arms ; yet how unlike in effect : 

I have seen the day, with my good biting falchion, 
I would have made them skip : I am old now, 
And these same crosses spoil me. 

All the materials and all the methods of Shake- 
speare's Tragedy are to be found dispersed in his 
Comedy. Most of his themes are indifferent, and no 
one could predict which of them he will choose for a 
happy ending. Nor is there reason to suppose that 
the public called at one time for comic stories, at 
another time foi; tragic, and that his plots were adapted 
to suit the demand. The real difference is in his own 
mood ; the atmosphere and impression which give to 
each play its character are reflected from his own 
thought, and cannot be ranged under two heads to 
meet the mechanical requirements of criticism. 

It is this which gives importance to the determina- 
tion of the chronological order of the plays. Endless 
labour has been spent on the task ; and although, in 



v.] STORY AND CHARACTER 131 

this question, as in all others connected with Shake- 
speare, there is a tendency to overstate the certainty 
of the results, yet results of value have been obtained. 
Plays of the same type have been shown to fall within 
the same period of his life. His early boisterous 
Comedies and his prentice-work on history are followed 
by his joyous Comedies and mature Histories ; these 
again by his Tragedies and painful Comedies ; and last, 
at the close of his career, he reverts to Comedy, but 
Comedy so unlike the former kind, that modern 
criticism has been compelled to invent another name 
for these final plays, and has called them Komances. 
There is no escape from the broad lines of this classifica- 
tion. No single play can be proved to fall out of the 
company of its own kind. The fancies of those critics 
who amuse themselves by picturing Shakespeare as 
the complete tradesman have no facts to work upon. 
" One wonders," says Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps, " what 
Heminge and Condell would have thought if they 
had apx^lied to Shakespeare for a new comedy, and 
the great dramatist had told them that he could not 
possibly comply with their wishes, he being then in 
his Tragic Period." What they would have thought 
may admit a wide conjecture; what they got is less 
doubtful. If they asked for a comedy when he was 
writing his great tragedies they got Measure for 
Measure or Troilus and Cressida ; if they asked for a 
tragedy when he was writing his happiest works of 
wit and lyric fantasy, they got Borneo and Juliet. 

Shakespeare's Comedy is akin to his Tragedy, and 
does not come of the other house. The kind of 
Comedy which has been most famous and most 
influential in the world's history is satirical Comedy, 
which takes its stand on the best social usage, and 
laughs at the follies of idealists. Its feet are planted 



132 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

firmly on the earth beneath, and it pays no regard to 
the heavens above, nor to the waters that are under 
the earth. Socrates and the founders of modern 
science are laughed^ out of court along with the half- 
witted fops and the half-crazy charlatans. But this is 
not Shakespeare's Comedy. His imagination is too 
active to permit him to find rest in a single attitude. 
His mind is always open to the wider issues, which 
reach out on all sides, into fantasy or metaphysic. He 
can study the life of his fellows as a man might study 
life on ship-board, and can take delight in the daily 
intrigues of the human family ; but there is a back- 
ground to the picture ; he is often caught thinking of 
the sea, which pays no attention to good sense, and of 
the two-inch plank, which may start at any moment. 
Wit and good sense there is in plenty ; and there is a 
woman, or a humorist, to show that wit and good 
sense are insufficient. Even in Lovers Labour 's Lost, 
Biron, the apostle of wit and good sense, is sent to 
jest for a twelvemonth in a hospital. In The Merchant 
of Venice the whole action of the play passes on the 
confines of tragedy, and is barely saved from cross- 
ing into the darker realm. On the leaden casket is 
engraved ithe motto of Shakespeare's philosophy: 
" Who chooseth me must give and hazard all he hath." 
Bassanio is not called upon to pay the full debt ; but 
the voice of tragedy has been heard, as it is heard 
again in the passion of Shylock. The first breathings 
of tragic feeling, which are found even in the gayest 
of the early comedies, steadily increase in volume and 
intensity, until the storm rises, and blows all laughter 
out of the plays, except the laughter of the fool. It 
is as if Shakespeare were carried into tragedy against 
his will; his comedies, built on the old framework of 
clever trick and ludicrous misunderstanding, become 



v.] STORY AND CHARACTER 133 

serious on his Lands ; until at last lie recognises the 
position, cuts away all the mechanical devices whereby 
the semblance of happiness is vainly preserved, and 
goes with open eyes to meet a trial that has become 
inevitable. 

The classic apparatus of criticism is not very well 
adapted to deal with this case. There is not a par- 
ticle of evidence to show that Shakespeare held any 
views on the theory of the drama, or that the question 
was a live one in his mind. The species of play that 
he most affected in practice has been well described by 
Polonius ; it is the " tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, 
scene individable, or poem unlimited." His first care 
was to get hold of a story that might be shaped to the 
needs of the theatre. It is possible, no doubt, for a 
dramatist, as it is for a novelist, to go another way to 
work. He may conceive living characters, and devise 
events to exhibit them ; or he may start with a moral, 
a philosophy of life, an atmosphere, a sentiment, and 
set his puppets to express it. But Shakespeare kept 
to the old road, and sought first for a story. Some of 
his characters were made by his story, as characters 
are made by the events of life. Others he permits to 
intrude upon the story, as old friends, or new visitors, 
intrude upon a plan and disorder it. His wisdom of 
life grew, a rich incrustation, upon the events and 
situations of his fable. But the story came first with 
him, — as it came first with his audience, as it comes 
first with every child. 

Those who have studied Shakespeare's plays with an 
eye to their making will ask for no proof of this. If 
proof were needed, it could be found in the incom- 
modities and violences which are sometimes put upon 
him by the necessity of keeping to the story when the 
characters have come alive and are pulling another 



134 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

way. He spent no great care, one would say, on the 
original choice of a theme, but took it as he found it, 
if it looked promising. Then he dressed his characters, 
and put them in action, so that his opening scenes are 
often a kind of postulate, which the spectator or reader 
is asked to grant. At this point of the play improba- 
bility is of no account; the intelligent reader will 
accept the situation as a gift, and will become alert 
and critical only when the next step is taken, and he 
is asked to concede the truth of the argument — given 
these persons in this situation, such and such events 
will follow. Let it be granted that an old king divides 
his realm among his three daughters, exacting from 
each of them a profession of ardent affection. Let it 
be granted that a merchant borrows money of a Jew 
on condition that if he fail to rejjay it punctually he 
shall forfeit a pound of his own flesh. Let it be 
granted that a young prince sees a ghost, who tells 
him that his uncle, the reigning king, and second 
husband of his mother, is a murderer. The hypo- 
thetical preambles of King Lear, The Merchant of Venice, 
and Hamlet are really much more elaborate than this, 
but this may serve to illustrate Shakespeare's method. 
Before appealing to the sympathies and judgment of 
his audience he has to acquaint them with the situation. 
Until the situation is created he cannot get to work 
on his characters. His plays open with a postulate ; 
then the characters begin to live, and, as Act follows 
Act, come into ever closer and more vital relation to 
the course of events ; till at last the play is closed, 
sometimes triumphantly and inevitably, by exhibiting 
the result of all that has gone before ; at other times 
feebly and carelessly, by neglecting the new interests 
that have grown around the characters, and dragging 
the story back into its predestined shape. 



T.] STORY AND CHARACTER 135 

If this be so, it makes some kinds of criticism idle. 
Why, it is often asked, did not Cordelia humour her 
father a little? She was too stubborn and rude, where 
tact and sympathetic understanding might, without any 
violation of truth, have saved the situation. It is easy 
to answer this question by enlarging on the character of 
Cordelia, and on that touch of obstinacy which is often 
found in very pure and unselfish natures. But this is 
really beside the mark; and those who spend so much 
thought on Cordelia are apt to forget Shakespeare. 
If Cordelia had been perfectly tender and tactful, 
there would have been no play. The situation would 
have been saved, and the dramatist who was in attend- 
ance to celebrate the sequel of the situation might 
have packed up his pipes and gone home. This is not 
to say that the character of Cordelia is drawn carelessly 
or inconsistently. But it is a character invented for 
the situation, so that to argue from the character to 
the plot is to invert the true order of things in the 
artist's mind. To go further, and discuss Cordelia's 
childhood as a serious question of criticism, is to lose 
all hold on the real dramatic problem, and to fall back 
among the idle people, who ask to be deceived, and 
are deceived. It would be as reasonable to attempt to 
judge a picture by considering all those things which 
might possibly have been included in it if the frame 
had been larger. The frame, which to the uninstructed 
gazer is a mere limitation and obstacle, hindering his 
wider view of reality, is to the painter the beginning 
and foundation and condition of all that appears 
within it. 

In the great tragedies story and character are 
marvellously adapted to each other ; hardly anything 
is forced or twisted to bring it within the limits of the 
scheme. By the time that he wrote Lear and Othello, 



136 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

Shakespeare was a master craftsman, deeply acquainted 
with life, which had to be portrayed, and thoroughly 
exercised, by long practice, in the handling of all those 
dramatic schemes and patterns which had to be filled. 
But in his early comedies, and also, strangely enough, 
in his latest plays, the adaptation of story and char- 
acter is less perfect. How lightly troubles find their 
solution in the comedies ! In The Two Geyitlemen of 
Verona, Proteus, if we are to judge him by his deeds, 
is shallow and fickle, and false both to Valentine, 
his friend, and to Julia, his affianced love. He is 
converted by being found out, at the end of the Fifth 
Act. A play must have an end, and this play is a 
comedy, so he makes an acceptable penitent. "My 
shame and guilt confounds me," he says, when Valen- 
tine has rescued Silvia from his violence. A few lines 
later he returns to his old love, and philosophises on 
inconstancy : 

What is in Silvia's face but I may spy 
More fresh in Julia's with a constant eye? 

If he had thought of this before, it would have 
ruined the play. What hard heart will quarrel with 
an ending which gives us a double marriage, 

One feast, one house, one mutual happiness ? 

In Twelfth Night Viola alone, of all who fall in love, 
is honoured by being married to the first object of her 
affections ; and it may perhaps be said, in Shakespeare's 
defence, that she alone deserves this particular honour. 
The rest are married, or kept single, much as silken 
strands are disposed in a gay pattern. These plays, 
after all, are comedies of intrigue ; the pattern is very 
elaborate ; and it would be ridiculous to discuss the 
characters seriously, were it not that Shakespeare has 



v.] STORY AND CHARACTER 137 

worked so much of real and living character into the 
scheme^ that we are emboldened thereby to ask him 
for the impossible. If all the characters are to live, 
the plot would have to be simpler and less symmetri- 
cal. All are, at least, most happily adapted to the 
light uses of comedy. The world in which they move 
is a rainbow world of love in idleness. The intensities 
and realities of life shimmer into smoke and film in 
that delicate air. The inhabitants are victims of love- 
fancy which is engendered in the eyes, youths and 
maidens who dally with the innocence of Love, votaries 
of Love, 

Who kissed his wings that brought him yesterday, 
And praise his wings to-day that he is flown. 

In what other world were there ever so many witty 
lovers ? In what other world were melancholy, and 
contempt, and anger, ever made to look so beautiful ? 
When Shakespeare has no further use for a character, 
he sometimes disposes of him in the most unprincipled 
and reckless fashion. Consider the fate of Antigonus 
in Tlie Wintefs Tale. Up to the time of his sudden 
death Antigonus has served his maker well ; he has 
played an important part in the action, and by his 
devotion and courage has won the affection of all the 
spectators. It is he who saves the daughter of 
Hermione from the mad rage of the king. "1^11 
pawn the little blood which I have left," he says, 
"to save the innocent." He is allowed to take the 
child away on condition that he shall expose her in 
some desert place, and leave her to the mercy of 
chance. He fulfils his task, and now, by the end of 
the Third Act, his part in the play is over. Sixteen 
years are to pass, and new matters are to engage our 
attention ; surely the aged nobleman might have been 



138 SHAKESPEAKE [chap. 

allowed to retire in peace. Shakespeare thought other- 
wise ; perhaps he felt it important that no news what- 
ever concerning the child should reach Leontes, and 
therefore resolved to make away with the only likely 
messenger. Antigonus takes an affecting farewell of 
the infant princess ; the weather grows stormy ; and 
the rest must be told in Shakespeare's words : 

Antigonus. Farewell ; 

The day frowns more and more : thou'rt like to have 
A lullaby too rough : I never saw 
The heavens so dim by day. A savage clamour ! 
Well may I get aboard. This is the chase, 
I am gone for ever ! [^ExU pursued by a beqr. 

This is the first we hear of the bear, and would be the 
last, were it not that Shakespeare, having in this wise 
disposed of poor Antigonus, makes a thrifty use of the 
remains at the feast of Comedy. The clown comes in 
to report, with much amusing detail, how the bear 
has only half-dined on the gentleman, and is at it 
now. It is this sort of conduct, on the part of the 
dramatist, that the word Eomance has been used to 
cover. The thorough-paced Romantic critic is fully 
entitled to refute the objections urged by classic cen- 
sors against Shakespeare's dramatic method ; but if he 
profess to be unable to understand them, he disgraces 
his own wit. 

The plot must be carried on, the interest and move- 
ment of the story maintained, at all costs, even if our 
sympathies are outraged by the wild justice that is 
done in the name of Comedy. The principal char- 
acters in All's Well that Ends Well are designed for 
their parts in the intrigue, but not even Shakespeare's 
skill can unite the incompatible, and teach them how 
to do their dramatic work without weakening their 



v.] STORY AND CHARACTER 139 

claim on our sympathies. "I cannot reconcile my 
heart," says Johnson, " to Bertram, a man noble with- 
out generosity, and young without truth ; who marries 
Helen as a coward, and leaves her as a profligate ; 
when she is dead by his unkindness, sneaks home to 
a second marriage, is accused by a woman whom he 
has wronged, defends himself by falsehood, and is 
dismissed to happiness." And Claudio, in Much Ado, 
is a fair companion for him, a very ill-conditioned, 
self-righteous young fop, who is saved from punish- 
ment by the virtues of others and the necessities of 
the plot. It is a comfort to hear old Antonio speak 
his mind on him and his like : 

What, man ! I know them, yea 
And what they weigh, even to the utmost scruple, 
Scambling, out-facing, fashion-mongering hoys, 
That lie and cog and flout, deprave and slander. 

Nor does Beatrice leave her opinion doubtful. 

But these are creatures judging a fellow-creature. 
What would the great artificer of them all have said, 
if he had been compelled to reply to Johnson's repeated 
accusation? "He sacrifices virtue," says Johnson 
again, "to convenience, and is so much more careful 
to please than to instruct, that he seems to write 
without any moral purpose." Would not Shakespeare 
have defended his characters with something of the 
large humorous tolerance displayed by Falstaff towards 
his ragged regiment ? " Tell me. Jack," says the 
Prince, " whose fellows are these that come after ? " 
" Mine, Hal, mine," says Ealstaff, with wary geniality. 
" I did never see such pitiful rascals," says the Prince, 
who was a frank and fearless commentator. And then 
Falstaff, with one of those sudden reaches of ima- 
gination which disconcert the adversary by forcing 



140 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

him off the narrow ground of his choice — " Tut, tut ; 
good enough to toss; food for powder, food for 
powder; they'll fill a pit as well as better: tush, 
man, mortal men, mortal men." Might not Shake- 
speare have replied in the same fashion to a critic of 
heroic leanings ? His profligates and coxcombs fill a 
plot as well as better, and when all is said, they are 
mortal men. Shakespeare's carelessness is a part of 
his magnanimity, and a testimony to his boundless 
resource. 

If we sometimes find it hard to forgive him, it is partly 
because we are dissatisfied with the government of the 
world, and call out for '' poetic justice," a narrow and 
rigid apportionment of rewards and punishments accord- 
ing to the dictates of the moral sense. Shakespeare 
moves in a larger scheme of things, where the sun rises 
on the evil and on the good. He finds it easy, there- 
fore, to accept his story as a kind of providence, and to 
abide by its surprising awards. Why did he create so 
exquisite a being as Imogen for the jealous and paltry 
Posthumus ? He has the precedent of nature, which 
makes many strangely-assorted matches ; and he does 
not greatly care what we think of Posthumus. In the 
cases where he does care, where ill deeds are assigned 
by the story to one who must be kept dear and 
honourable, he rouses himself to magnificent effort. 
The story of Othello involved false suspicions, enter- 
tained by Othello on the testimony of slander, against 
his young and innocent wife, who had left her home 
and her country to follow him. If these suspicions 
grew in the normal fashion, and were nurtured by 
jealousy, there would be no tragedy, only another 
Winter's Tale. Shakespeare played for the higher 
stakes. From the first he makes Othello a man after 
his own heart, tender, generous, brave, and utterly 



v.] STORY AND CHARACTER 141 

magnanimous. At the opening of the play, when the 
Senator Brabantio appears, with officers and torches, to 
take him, and the followers on both sides draw their 
weapons, the character of Othello is given, with thril- 
ling effect, in a few words : 

Othello. Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them. 
Good Siguier, you shall more command with years, 
Than with your weapons. 

Fearlessness and the habit of command, pride that 
would be disgraced by a street brawl, respect for law 
and humanity, reverence for age, laconic speech, and a 
touch of contempt for the folly that would pit itself, 
with a rabble of menials, against the General of the 
Eepublic and his bodyguard — all this is expressed in 
two lines. Everything that follows, up to the crisis of 
the play, helps to raise Othello to the top of admiration, 
and to fix him in the affections of the reader. Scene 
follows scene, and in every one of them, it might be 
said, Shakespeare is making his task more hopeless. 
How is he to fill out the story, and yet save our sym- 
pathies for Othello ? The effort must be heroic : and 
it is. He invents lago. The greatness of lago may 
be measured by this, that Othello never loses our 
sympathy. By slow and legitimate means, never 
extravagant, circumstance is added to circumstance, 
until a net is woven to take Othello in its toils. But 
circumstance is not his undoing. Left to himself, even 
when the toils were closing in upon him, Othello 
would have rent them asunder, and shaken them 
off. When he grows impatient, and seems likely 
to break free, lago is at hand, to keep him still, and 
compel him to think. On matters like these Othello 
cannot think ; he is accustomed to impulse, instinct, 
and action ; these tedious processes of arguing on dis- 



142 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

honour are torture to him ; and when he tries to think, 
he thinks wrong. His own account of himself is true : 

A man not easily jealous, but being wrought, 
Perplexed in the extreme. 

There is not another of Shakespeare's plays which is 
so white-hot with imagination, so free from doubtful 
or extraneous matter, and so perfectly welded, as 
Othello. Macbeth has some weak scenes ; Hamlet and 
King Lear are cast in a more variegated mould, so that 
the tension is sometimes relaxed and the heat abated ; 
Antony and Cleopatra approaches, in some of its scenes, 
to the earlier chronicle manner. In general, it is true 
to say that Shakespeare cheerfully burdens himself 
with a plot which is either very complex, or very 
artificial, or both, and then goes to work to make a 
living thing of it. His care for probability is least in 
his latest plays. Towards the beginning of his career 
he wrote The Comedy of Errors, which is a story of two 
pairs of twin brothers, each pair so exactly alike that 
no one can tell them apart. Towards the close he 
wrote Cymheline, of which Johnson speaks truly and 
moderately when he says : " This play has many just 
sentiments, some natural dialogues, and some pleasing 
scenes, but they are obtained at the expense of much 
incongruity. To remark the folly of the fiction, the 
absurdity of the conduct, the confusion of the names 
and manners of different times, and the impossibility 
of the events in any system of life, were to waste 
criticism upon unresisting imbecility, upon faults too 
evident for detection, and too gross for aggravation." 
The best and highest part of Shakespeare's imagina- 
tion was not concerned, one is tempted to say, with 
plot-architecture. Any plot is good enough for him, 
if it leads him, by unlikely and tortuous ways, to a 



v.] STORY AND CHARACTER 143 

real situation ; and no sooner is "he confronted with a 
real situation than his characters, invented, it may be, 
only to fill a place in the story, become live and 
convincing. Many a poet who pays more regard to 
proportion and verisimilitude finds that his char- 
acters, though they do and suffer nothing that does 
not arise simply and naturally from the development 
of the plot, have no breath in them, and lie dead upon 
his hands. Unity, severity of structure, freedom from 
excess, the beauties of simplicity and order, — these 
may be learned from the Greeks. But where can this 
amazing secret of life be learned? It is the miracle of 
Nature — not the Nature exalted by the schools as a 
model of thrift and restraint, but the true Nature, the 
goddess of wasteful and ridiculous excess, who pours 
forth without ceasing, at all times and in the most un- 
likely places, her enormous and extravagant gift of 
life. The story may be shapeless, grotesque, inanimate, 
like a stone rejected by the curious builders who seek 
for severity of form. But Nature does not despise it. 

How long does it lie, 
The bad and barren bit of stuff you kick, 
Before encroached on and encompassed round 
With minute moss, weed, wild-flower — made alive 
By worm and fly and foot of the free bird ? 

It is thus that Shakespeare works on a story, conceal- 
ing its barren ugliness under the life of his own 
creation. It is impossible to say when he will suddenly 
put forth his vital power, and take away the breath of 
his readers by some astonishing piece of insight which 
defeats all expectation. He is most natural when 
he upsets all rational forecasts. We are accustomed 
to anticipate how others will behave in the matters 
that most nearly concern us ; we seem to know what 



144 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

we shall say to them, and to be able to forecast what 
they will say in answer. We are accustomed, too, to 
find that our anticipation is wrong; what really 
happens gives the lie to the little stilted drama that 
we imagined, and we recognise at once how poor and 
false our fancy was, how much truer and more surpris- 
ing the thing that happens is than the thing that we 
invented. So it is in Shakespeare. His surprises have 
the same convincing quality; the word once said is 
known to have been inevitable, and the character 
ceases to be a character of fiction, controlled by the 
plot. We are watching the events of real life ; from 
our hidden vantage-ground we see into the mystery of 
things, as if we were God's spies. 

It will not be out of place to call to remembrance 
a few only of these splendid divinations. 

Cleopatra has fallen into the power of Caesar, after 
the death of Antony. Caesar, in the measured terms 
of magnanimity befitting a professional conqueror, 
advises her to do nothing violent, and promises that 
she shall be honoured and consulted. "My master, 
and my lord ! " says the Queen ; to which Caesar 
makes gracious response, '^ Not so; Adieu," and goes 
out with his attendants. Then Cleopatra turns to her 
women : 

He words me, girls, he words me, that I should not 
Be noble to myself. 

And Iras, who sees the real situation no less truly, 
replies. 

Finish, good lady ; the bright day is done, 
And we are for the dark. 

These brief speeches, coming at the end of the long 
diplomatic interview, are like flashes of lightning 
discovering the perils of travellers among the Alps. 



v.] STORY AND CHARACTER 146 

Desdemona has suddenly had revealed to her, beyond 
all hope of mistake, what it is that Othello believes. 
He has " laid such despite and heavy terms upon her 
as true hearts cannot bear," and has left her. Emilia, 
grieved and solicitous, stays by her mistress : 

Emil. How do you, Madam ? How do you, my good 

Lady? 
Des. Faith, half asleep. 

Emil. Good Madam, what's the matter with my Lord ? 
Des. With who ? 

Emil. Why, with my Lord, Madam. 
Des. Who is thy Lord ? 
Emil. He that is yours, sweet Lady. 
Des. I have none : do not talk to me, Emilia : 

I cannot weep : nor answers have I none 

But what should go by water. 

Macbeth, brought to bay within his castle, hears 
that the Queen is dead : 

Macbeth. She should have died hereafter ; 

There would have been a time for such a word. 

Othello, coming into the bedchamber of his sleeping 
wife, looks upon that picture of innocence and beauty, 
and, lest he should be overcome by it, clutches at Ms 
failing resolve : 

Othello. It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul ; 
Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars ; 
It is the cause. 

So swift and certain is Shakespeare's insight, 
that he has often puzzled his licensed interpreters. 
The actor Fechter, finding no sense in these words, 
caused Othello to take up a toilet-glass, fallen from 
Desdemona' s hand, and, gazing therein on the image 
of his bronzed face, to exclaim, "It is the cause." 
I. 



146 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

Garrick himself, with no better understanding, wrote 
a dying speech for Macbeth, beginning, 

'Tis done ; the scene of life will quickly close ; 

and delivered it, with suitable death-agonies, to 
thronged audiences. This sort of thing makes every 
lover of Shakespeare willing, so far as the great 
tragedies are concerned, to forswear the theatre 
altogether. 

The truth is that his best things are not very 
effective on the stage. These packed utterances are 
glimpses merely of the hurry of unspoken thought; 
they come and are gone; they cannot be delivered 
emphatically, nor fully understood in the pause that 
separates them from the next sentence; and when 
they are understood, the reader feels no desire to 
applaud; he is seized by them, his thoughts are set 
a-working, and he is glad to be free from the 
importunacy of spectacle and action. Tragedy has 
no monopoly of them ; wherever the situation be- 
comes tense, the surprises of reality intrude. Falstaff 
is cast off, publicly disgraced and banished, by his old 
companion, now King Henry v. He stands among 
the crowd at the Coronation ceremony, by the side of 
Justice Shallow, whom he has cheated of money, 
duped with promises of Koyal favour, and despised ; 
he listens to the severe judgment of the King, and, 
when it is ended, watches the retreating procession. 
What trick, what device, has he now, to hide him 
from this open and apparent shame ? If we did not 
know it from Shakespeare, we could never have 
guessed how Falstaff would take the rebuff. He turns 
quite simply to his companion, and says, "Master 
Shallow, I owe you a thousand pound.'' It is some- 
thing to be a humorist, trained by habit to recognise 



v.] STORY AND CHARACTER 147 

the incongruity of facts. No less convincing is the 
acquiescence of Parolles, when his cowardice and 
treachery are brought home to him : 

Yet am I thankful; if my heart were great, 
'T would burst at this : Captain I '11 be no more, 
But I will eat, and drink, and sleep as soft 
As Captain shall. Simply the thing I am 
Shall make me live. 

Shakespeare dared to follow his characters into those 
dim recesses of personality where the hunted soul 
stands at bay, and proclaims itself, naked as it is, for 
a greater thing than law and opinion. 

Perhaps the vitalising power of Shakespeare is best 
seen in the loving care that he sometimes spends on 
subsidiary characters, whose connection with the plot 
is but slight. The young Osric, in Hamlet, has no 
business in the play except to carry Laertes' challenge 
to Hamlet. Shakespeare draws his portrait ; we learn 
that he is a landowner, and perceive that he is an 
accomplished courtier. Hamlet and Horatio discuss 
him at some length, and his own speech shows how 
seriously he is preoccupied with all the etiquette and 
formality of Court life. He exists, it cannot be 
doubted, merely as a foil for Hamlet's wit and melan- 
choly. When the mind is wholly taken up with 
tragic issues, when it is brooding on a great sorrow, 
or foreboding a hopeless event, the little daily affairs 
of life continue unaltered ; tables are served, courtesies 
interchanged, and the wheels of society revolve at 
their accustomed pace. Osric is the representative of 
society ; his talk is of gentility, skill in fencing, and 
the elegance of the proffered wager. How distant 
and dream-like it all seems to Hamlet, and to those 
who are in his secret ! But this trivial society is real 



148 SHAKESPEAKE [chap. 

and necessary, and strong with, the giant strength of 
custom and institution. Shakespeare demonstrates 
its reality by showing us a live inhabitant. He might 
have entrusted the challenge to a walking-gentleman, 
and concluded the business in a few lines. By making 
a scene of it, lie adds a last touch of pathos to the 
loneliness of Hamlet, and gives a last opportunity for 
the display of that incomparable vein of irony. 

A stsanger testimony to the wealth, of bis creative 
genius may be found in its superfluous creations. 
Some of his characters incommode him by their 
vitality, and even refuse the duties for which they 
were created. Barnardine, in Measure for Measure, 
is one of these rebels. In the Italian original of 
the story Isabella, to save the life of her brother, 
yields to the wicked deputy, who thereupon breaks 
his promise, and causes Claudio to be executed in the 
prison. George Whetstone, who handled the story 
before Shakespeare, mitigated one of these atrocities; 
in his version the gaoler is persuaded to substitute 
the head of a newly executed criminal for the head of 
Claudio. In Shakespeare's play we find, along with 
Claudio, a prisoner called Barnardine, who is under 
sentence of death, and is designed to serve as Claudio's 
proxy. He is a Bohemian born, " a man that appre- 
hends death no more dreadfully but as a drunken 
sleep ; careless, reckless, and fearless of what's past, 
present, or to come; insensible of mortality, and 
desperately mortal." All arrangements are made for 
the substitution, and Barnardine is called forth to his 
death. Then a strange thing happens. Barnardine, a 
mere detail of the machinery, comes alive, and so 
endears himself to his maker, that his execution is felt 
to be impossible. Even the murderer of Antigonus 
has not the heart to put Barnardine to death. A way 



v.] STORY AND CHARACTER 149 

out must be found ; the disguised Duke suggests that 
Barnardine is unfit to die, and the Provost comes in 
with the timely news that a pirate called Eagozine, 
who exactly resembles Claudio, has just died in the 
prison of a fever. So Barnardine, who was born to be 
hanged, is left useless in his cell, until at the close of 
the play he is kindly remembered and pardoned. The 
plot is managed without him ; yet, if he were omitted, 
he would be sadly missed. He is a fine example of 
the aristocratic temper. In that over-heated atmo- 
sphere of casuistry and cowardice he alone is self- 
possessed and indifferent. He treats the executioner 
like his valet : " How now, Abhorson ? What 's the 
news with you ? " His decision of character is abso- 
lute : " I will not consent to die this day, that 's 
certain.'^ Those who speak to him, Duke and tapster 
alike, assume the deprecating tone of inferiors. 
"But hear you " says the Duke, and is inter- 
rupted : " Not a word : if you have anything to say to 
me, come to my ward ; for thence will not I to-day." 
So the Bohemian goes back, to hold his court in the 
straw. It is a wonderful portrait of the gentleman 
vagabond, and is presented by Shakespeare to his 
audience, a perfect gratuity. 

Some of the most famous characters in the plays 
are in a like case with Barnardine ; Shakespeare loves 
them, and portrays them so sympathetically that they 
engage the interest of the audience beyond what is 
required (almost beyond what is permitted) by the 
general trend of the story. The diverse interpreta- 
tions given by notable actors to the part of Shylock 
have their origin in a certain incongruity between the 
story that Shakespeare accepted, and the character of 
the Jew as it came to life in his hands. Some actors, 
careful for the story, have laid stress on revenge, 



160 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

cunning, and the thirst for innocent blood. Others, 
convinced by Shakespeare's sympathy, have presented 
so sad and human a figure that the verdict of the 
Court is accepted without enthusiasm, Portia seems 
little better than a clever trickster, and the actor of 
Gratiano, who is compelled to exult, with gibe and 
taunt, over the lonely and broken old man, forfeits 
all favour with the audience. The difficulty is in the 
play. The Jew of the story is the monster of the 
mediaeval imagination, and the story almost requires 
such a monster, if it is to go with ringing effect on the 
stage. Shylock is a man, and a man more sinned 
against than sinning. He is one of those characters 
of Shakespeare whose voices we know, whose very 
tricks of phrasing are peculiar to themselves. Antonio 
and Bassanio are pale shadows of men compared with 
this gaunt, tragic figure, whose love of his race is as 
deep as life; who pleads the cause of a common 
humanity against the cruelties of prejudice; whose 
very hatred has in it something of the nobility of 
patriotic passion ; whose heart is stirred with tender 
memories even in the midst of his lament over the 
stolen ducats ; who, in the end, is dismissed, unpro- 
testing, to insult and oblivion. 

I pray you give me leave to go from hence : 
I am not well. Send the deed after me, 
And I will sign it. 

So ends the tragedy of Shylock, and the air is heavy 
with it long after the, babble of the love-plot has 
begun again. The Fifth Act of The Merchant of Venice 
is an exquisite piece of romantic comedy ; but it is a 
welcome distraction, not a full solution. The revenge- 
ful Jew, whose defeat was to have added triumph to 
happiness, keeps possession of the play, and the 



v.] STORY AND CHARACTER 161 

memory of him gives to these beautiful closing scenes 
an undesigned air of heartless frivolity. 

The chief case of all is Tal staff, who was originally 
intended, so far as we can judge from the part assigned 
to him in the development of the plot, to be a coarse, 
fat, tavern rogue, dissolute, scurrilous, and worthless. 
But Shakespeare lent him all his own wit and some of 
his own metaphysic, and Falstaff became so potent in 
charm that we are bewitched with the rogue's com- 
pany, and are more than half inclined to adopt his 
view of the titular hero of the epic, Prince Henry. 
"A good shallow young fellow," says Falstaff; "'a 
would have made a good pan tier ; 'a would have 
chipped bread well." This view, accepted, makes 
nonsense of the whole structure of the play ; and 
Shakespeare comes very near to making nonsense of it 
for the glorification of Falstaff. He saves himself by 
forcible, not to say violent, means, after preparing the 
way in the unnatural and pedantic soliloquy of the 
Prince : 

I know you all, and will awhile uphold 
The unyok'd humour of your idleness : 
Yet herein will I imitate the sun, 

— and so on, for twenty lines or more, like the induction 
of a bald Morality play. Truly, a p]ot is in a poor 
case when it sets up defences like this against the 
artillery of Falstaff's criticism and humour, and the 
insidious advances of his good-fellowship. 

In these great instances Shakespeare's fecundity of 
imagination somewhat confuses the outlines of the 
design, and distracts the sympathies of the audience. 
Without direction given to sympathy, a play is not a 
play, but a chaos or patchwork. The Greeks secured 
unity by means of the Chorus, which mediates between 



152 SHAKESPEAEE [chap. 

the actors and the spectators, bespeaking attention, 
interpreting events, and guiding the feelings. Shake- 
speare had no Chorus, but he attains the same end in 
another way. In almost all his plays there is a clear 
enough point of view; there is some character, or 
group of characters, through whose eyes the events of 
the play must be seen, if they are to be seen in right 
perspective. Some of his creatures he keeps nearer to 
himself than others. The meaning of Lovers Labour's 
Lost cannot be read through the eyes of Armado,nor that 
of Twelfth Night through the eyes of Malvolio. What 
comes of regarding the play of Hamlet from the point 
of view of Polonius ? A hundred critical essays and 
dissertations on the symptoms of madness ; but no 
understanding, and no sympathy with Shakespeare, 
Moreover, the point of view gradually shifts as the 
years pass by. It would be vain to attempt to read 
Romeo and Juliet from the standpoint of Lady Capulet ; 
even so calm and experienced a guide as Friar 
Laurence cannot lead us to the heart of the play. On 
the other hand, Tlie Tempest, or The Winter^s Tale, cannot 
be read aright by those whose sympathies are concen- 
trated on Miranda and Ferdinand, or on Florizel and 
Perdita. Heine, speaking of Juliet and Miranda, 
likens them to the sun and moon. Moonlight, it may 
be added, is reflected sunlight; and the ethereal 
quality of Miranda's beauty is the quality belonging to 
a reflection. We sympathise with Miranda and Fer- 
dinand, but it is not their passion that we feel, rather 
it is the benevolence and wisdom of Prospero rejoicing 
in their passion. Miranda, that is to say, is Prospero's 
Miranda. No woman ever appeared thus to her lover 
— so completely unsophisticated, so absolutely simple. 
She is compact, says Mrs. Jameson, of the very 
elements of womanhood : and it is this elemental 



v.] STORY AND CHARACTER 153 

character which appeals, more than anything individual 
or distinctive, to the imagination of mature age. 

Shakespeare's plays are works of art, not chronicles 
of fact. There is always a centre of interest. Some 
of the characters are kept in the full light of this area 
of perfect vision. Others, moving in the outer field of 
vision, have no value save in relation to this centre. 
His habit of over-crowding his canvas is sometimes 
detrimental to the main impression. Edmund's love- 
intrigues, for instance, in King Lear, — who does not 
find them a tedious piece of machinery ? They belong 
to the story, but they do not help the play. For the 
most part, and in the most carefully ordered of the 
plays, the subsidiary characters and events are used to 
enhance the main impression. They have no full and 
independent existence ; they are seen only in a limited 
aspect, and have just enough vitality to enable them to 
play their allotted part in the action. 

A great part of the character-study which is so much 
in vogue among Shakespeare critics is vitiated by its 
neglect of this consideration. The critics must needs 
be wiser than Shakespeare, and must finish his sketches 
for him, telling us more about his characters than 
ever he knew. They treat each play as if it were a 
chessboard, and work out problems that never entered 
into his imagination. They alter the focus, and 
force all things to illustrate this detail or that. 
They plead reverence for Shakespeare's omniscience, 
and pay a very poor compliment to his art. A play 
is like a piano; if it is tuned to one key, it is out 
of tune for every other. The popular saying which 
denies all significance to the play of Hamlet with the 
Prince of Denmark left out, shows a just sense of this. 
Yet the study of the lesser characters, conceived in 
relation, not to Hamlet, but to one another, continues 



154 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

to exercise the critics. The King in Hamlet is little 
better than a man of straw. He is sufficiently realised 
for Shakespeare's purpose; we see him through Hamlet's 
eyes, and share Hamlet's hatred of him. His soliloquy 
in the scene where Hamlet discovers him praying is 
merely plausible; its rhyming tag would lose nothing 
if it were spoken by a chorus and addressed to the 
audience : 

His words fly up, his thoughts remain below ; 
Words without thoughts never to heaven go. 

His murder of his brother, his usurpation, and his 
wooing of the Queen, are all shown to us as they 
affected Hamlet after the event ; to discuss them in any 
other light is idle. When Shakespeare intended a 
full-length portrait of a murderer, he wrote Macbeth, in 
which play Malcolm and Donalbain, the lawful heirs 
to the crown, fall into the background and are sub- 
ordinated to the central interest. 

Even in the comedies, where the interest is less con- 
centrated than in Hamlet or Macbeth, some of the chief 
figures are no more than accessory. Bassanio, for 
instance, in Tlie Merchant of Venice, must not be judged 
by critical methods which are fair when applied to 
Eomeo. There is barely room for him in the central 
part of the picture. He is sketched lightly and suffi- 
ciently in his twofold aspect, as Antonio's friend and 
Portia's suitor. He is a careless and adventurous 
young gallant ; the type was familiar, and was easy to 
suggest by a few outlines. Wealth is the burden of 
his wooing dance, as it was of Petruchio's. Only in 
the casket scene does he put on a fuller semblance of 
thought and emotion, and this, no doubt, was the 
dramatist's tribute to Portia, whose surrender of 
herself is made in words so beautiful and moving that 



v.] STORY AND CHARACTER 155 

the situation would become almost painful if Bassanio 
were not furnished with his response from the same 
rich store of poetry. His character, his motives, his 
merits and defects as Portia's husband — these will 
continue to be the theme of countless essays. The 
embroidery of Shakespeare has become a national in- 
dustry, harmless enough so long as it is not mistaken 
for criticism. But even good critics sometimes permit 
themselves the dangerous assumption that Shake- 
speare's meaning is not written broad on the play: 

And thus do they of wisdom and of reach 
With windlasses and with assays of bias, 
By indirections find directions out. 

What they fail to remark is that in the very act of 
rescuing buried meanings, alleged to be all important, 
they are condemning the work of the playwright. 
Shakespeare is subtle, fearfully and wonderfully subtle ; 
and he is sometimes obscure, lamentably obscure. But 
in spite of all this, most of his plays make a distinct 
and immediate impression, by which, in the main, the 
play is to be judged. The impression is the play. 

The analysis and illustration of Shakespeare's char- 
acters, considered separately, has had so long a vogue, 
and has produced work so memorable, that we are in 
some danger of forgetting how partial such a method 
must be. The heroines of the several plays are often 
taken out of their dramatic setting to be compared 
one with another. There was never a more delightful 
pastime. But let it be remembered how we come by our 
knowledge of these characters. Rosalind we know in 
the sweet vacancy of the forest of Arden : we see Isabella 
only at the direst crisis of her history. Portia and 
Julia are overheard talking to their maids : Ophelia 
has no confidential friend, unless the brotherly lecture 



156 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

of Laertes be regarded as aii invitation to confidence. 
Hermia and Helena in a ^ Midsummer Night's Dream 
are the sport of tlie fairies ; Katherine, in The Taming 
of the Shrew, is the victim of human experiment. The 
marvellous art of Shakespeare presents each of these 
in so natural a guise that we forget the slightness of 
our acquaintance, and the exceptional nature of our 
opportunities. We seem to know them all, and to be 
able to predict how each of them will act in trials 
to which she cannot be exposed. What if Desdemona 
had been Lear's daughter, and Cordelia Othello's wife ? 
Would not the sensitive affection of the one and the 
proud sincerity of the other have given us a different 
result? So we are lured further and further afield, 
until we find ourselves arguing on questions that have 
no meaning for criticism, and no existence save in 
dreams. It is well to go back to Shakespeare ; and to 
remember the conditions imposed upon him, whether 
by the story of his choice, or by the necessities of 
dramatic presentment. ISTo attempt can here be made 
to do more than select a few samples of his enormous 
riches, a few portraits from his gallery of character and 
a few topics from his treasury of thought. In either 
case the laws of the drama, which govern both, must 
not be neglected, even where they seem to relax their 
force. Some of his characters, it has been shown, tend 
to escape from their dramatic framework, and to assert 
their independence. In the same fashion, some of his 
favourite topics are treated with greater fullness and 
insistence than dramatic necessity can be proved to re- 
quire, and so seem to reveal to us the preoccupations of 
his own mind. The thought that pleases him recurs in 
many settings. But the dramatic scheme comes first ; 
for except in cases where it serves as a mere excuse, the 
scheme is the language of a playwright. As he grew 



v.] STORY AND CHARACTER 157 

in power, Shakespeare made his scheme more and 
more adequate to express his thought, so that in his 
great tragedies there is no escape from it. Comedy, 
History, Tragedy, the old order of the plays, gives a 
true enough statement of the development of his art 
and the progress of his mind. What remains to say 
may therefore be loosely arranged in this order. 

In the Comedies much is sacrificed to the story, 
aud the implements of Shakesi3eare's comic stage — • the 
deceits and mistakes and cross-pnrposes — are used to 
maintain suspense and prolong the interest. Criticism 
of human life occurs incidentally, but can hardly be 
said to dictate the plot, which, especially in the earlier 
Comedies, is sometimes as symmetrical and artificial 
as the plot of a comic opera. The audience, it is 
clear, were concerned chiefly with the event, and in 
his effort to hold their attention he often intro- 
duces a new complication when the main story has 
reached its natural close. So, in The Merchant of 
Venice, when happiness is full in sight, we are thrown 
back into uncertainty by the question of the rings. 
When the plot against Hero, in Much Ado, is success- 
fully unravelled, she is not restored at once to Claudio ; 
a new trick is devised, there is a scene of solemn 
lament for Hero, whom we know to be alive, and 
Claudio is offered, and accepts, the hand of another 
lady, who proves, in the last scene of all, to be his 
injured love. Those whose sympathies have been 
captured by the human situation may well feel some 
impatience with Shakespeare's habitually delayed 
solutions. It is an unpardonable indignity that is 
put upon Isabella, in Measure for Measure, when the 
disguised Duke, w^ho is by way of being the good 
angel of the piece, deludes her into thinking that her 
brother is dead, and keeps her crying lier complaints 



158 SHAKESPEAEE [chap. 

in the street, in order that he may play a game of cat 
and mouse with the wicked deputy. All this is done, 
he alleges, that the case against Angelo may proceed 

By cold gradation and well-balanced form ; 

but the true reason for it is dramatic ; the crisis must 
be kept for the end. So Isabella, who deserved to 
hear the truth, is sacrificed to the plot. 

The stories chosen for the plots of the Comedies are 
such as are found in great plenty in the novels of the 
time. Some of them, as for instance the story of the 
Comedy of Errors or of The Merry Wives, do not differ 
in their main outlines from the witty anecdotes of 
the Jest-books. Men and women are exhibited as 
the victims of mirthful experiment, or of whimsical 
accident. The trickery and practical jesting which 
abound in these plays would hardly work out to a 
happy conclusion in real life. A joke in action too 
often leads to unexpected results, sometimes tragic, 
sometimes merely squalid. It is the expense of spirit 
in a waste of discomfort. Shakespeare supplies the 
good wit of the Hundred Merry Tales with live 
characters and a real setting, yet escapes the imputa- 
tion of heartlessness. He so bathes his story in the 
atmosphere of poetry and fantasy, his characters are 
so high-spirited and good-tempered and resourceful, 
the action passes in such a tempest of boisterous 
enjoyment, and is mitigated by so many touches of 
human feeling, that the whole effect remains gracious 
and pleasant, and the master of the show is still 
the gentle Shakespeare. The characters of the pure 
Comedies are so confident in their happiness that 
they can play with it, and mock it, and put it to 
trials that would break fragility. They are equal to 
circumstance, aiid the most surprising adventures do 



v.] STORY AND CHARACTER 159 

not disconcert nor depress them. In a sense they too, 
like the tragic heroes and heroines, are the antagonists 
of Fate. But Fate, in the realm of Comedy, appears 
in the milder and more capricious character of Fortune, 
whose wheel turns and turns again, and vindicates the 
merry heart. " Who can control his Fate ? '^ says 
Othello. "'Tis but Fortune; all is Fortune," says 
Malvolio, when he believes himself to stand in favour 
with Olivia ; " Jove, not I, is the doer of this, and he 
is to be thanked." Olivia, ensnared by the beauty of 
the disguised Viola, gives voice to the same creed : 

I do I know not what, and fear to find 
Mine eye too great a flatterer for my mind : 
Fate, show thy force ; ourselves we do not owe ; 
What is decreed, must be ; and be this so. 

And Yiola, in like fashion, trusts to the event : 

O Time, thou must untangle this, not I ; 
It is too hard a knot for me to untie. 

The impulses and passions that shape man's life to 
happy or unhappy ends seem to owe their power to 
something greater than man, and refuse his control. 
Shakespeare gives them an independent life, and often 
embodies them in the supernatural beings who are 
exhibited on his stage. His witches and ghosts and 
fairies do not come uncalled; they are the shadows 
and reflections of the human mind, creatures of the 
mirror, who, by a startling and true psychology, are 
brought alive, released from the dominion of man's 
will, and established as his masters. Macbeth, excited 
by the dark hints of ambition, falls in with the witches, 
and thereafter is carried with fearful speed into an 
abyss of crime. Hamlet, saddened by the death of 
his father and tortured by the infidelity of his mother, 



160 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

receives the message of the ghost, which brings his 
suspicious and broodings to a point, and makes him 
thenceforward an instrument in the hands of destiny. 
In A Midsummer JSfighfs Dream, the inexplicable whims 
and changes of inconstant love seem to be the work of 
the fairies, sporting, not malevolently, with human 
weakness. The desire of the eyes, which is the mo- 
tive-power of Shakespeare's earlier romantic plays, 
is exhibited in many beautiful and fanciful guises, 
transforming itself into passion or caprice, and irre- 
sistibly leading its victims to unexpected goals. It 
creates its own values, and has no commerce with 
reason. The doctrine of this youthful love, in its 
lighter aspects, is set forth by Helena in A Midsummer 
JSfighfs Dream : 

Things base and vile, holding no quantity, 
Love can transpose to form and dignity ; — 

and is illustrated by the infatuation of Titania. It 
is expounded once more by the Duke in Twelfth 
Night : 

O spirit of Love, how quick and fresh art thou, 
That notwithstanding thy capacity 
Eeceiveth as the sea, nought enters there 
Of what validity and pitch so e'er 
But falls into abatement and low price 
Even in a minute ; so full of shapes is fancy, 
That it alone is high fantastical. 

But perhaps the best commentary on these younger 
plays is to be found in the famous lines wherein 
Marlowe, describing how Leander first saw Hero, pays 
his tribute to the "force and virtue of an amorous 
look." 



It lies not in our power to love or hate, 
For will in us is over-ruled by Fate. 



V] STORY AND CHARACTP:R 161 

When two are stripped, long ere the course begin 
We wish that one should lose, the other win ; 
And one especially do we affect 
Of two gold ingots, like in each respect. 
The reason no man knows; let it sufl&ce 
What we behold is censured by our eyes. 
Where both deliberate, the love is slight ; 
Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight ? 

The summons is as inevitable and unforeseen as that of 
death ; it comes to all, clown and courtier, wayward 
youth and serious maiden, leading them forth on the 
dance of Love through that maze of happy adventure 
which is Shakespeare's Comedy. None refuses the 
call, none is studious to reckon the cost. Young 
gallants, with no intent to turn husband, go on the 
slightest errand to the Antipodes, and run to meet 
their fate. Delicate girls, brought up in seclusion and 
luxury, put on hose and doublet and follow their 
defaulting lovers to the wild-wood, or to the court of 
a foreign potentate. The disguises and mistaken 
identities which are a stock device of the Comedies do 
not recur in the Tragedies. Youth is eager to multiply 
events, and to quicken the pace of life. But the world, 
which seemed so slow to start, when once it is set 
a-going moves all too fast. "I would set up my 
tabernacle here," says Charles Lamb in the gravest of 
his essays ; '^ I am content to stand still at the age to 
which I am arrived; I, and my friends, to be no 
younger, no richer, no handsomer. I do not want to 
be weaned by age, or drop, like mellow fruit, as they 
say, into the grave." These are the words of a man 
who knew the tragedy of life. When Shakespeare, in 
the fulness of his powers, came to close grips with 
reality, he put away all those mechanical expedients 
wherewith he had enlivened his early Comedies. He 



162 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

too learned that in the duel with Fate man is not the 
hunter, but the game, and that a losing match nobly 
played is his only possible victory. The poet of Lear 
and Othello was the fitter for the contest in that he had 
known the illimitable happiness and buoyancy of 
youth. " God,'' cries Hamlet, " I could be bounded 
in a nutshell, and count myself a King of infinite 
space; were it not that I have bad dreams." The 
dream of the Midsummer Night was not one of these. 
The perfect temper of the earlier Comedies gives the 
warrant of reality to the later and darker plays ; we 
are saved from the suspicion that the discords in the 
music are produced by some defect in the instrument, 
or that the night which descends on the poet is the 
night of blindness. His tragedies become more solemn 
when we remember that this awful vision of the world 
was shown to a man cast in the antique mould of 
humanity, equable, alert, and gay. 

When the gaiety spent itself, and Shakespeare's 
mind was centred on tragic problems, the themes of his 
later and darker Comedies were still drawn from the 
old inexhaustible source. The Italian Novel, in its 
long and brilliant history from the thirteenth to the 
sixteenth century, foreshadowed the development and 
change which is seen in Shakespeare's Comedies. It 
began with witty and fantastic anecdote, borrowed, in 
large part, from the scurrilities of French minstrels. 
By the genius of Boccaccio it was brought into closer 
touch with life. He retained many of the world-old 
jests, gross and impossible, but he intermixed them 
with another type of story, wherein he moves to pity 
and wonder by narrating memorable histories of 
passion. His chief sixteenth century disciples, to 
both of whom Shakespeare owed much, were Bandello 
and Cinthio. These men carried the novel still further 



v.] STORY AND CHARACTER 163 

in the direction of realism. Bandello asserts that all 
his novels record events which happened in his own 
time ; Cinthio also claims to base his stories on fact, 
and so handles them that they set forth difficult 
problems of human conduct. Novelists are much in 
the habit of pretending a moral purpose ; but the plea 
of these Kenaissance writers was primarily scientific. 
They claim to add to the materials for a science of 
human nature, which science may find later application 
in practice. They are the Machiavels of private life. 
In the new-found freedom of that age men were 
voyagers upon a treacherous unknown sea, and were 
glad to make acquaintance, in the chart supplied by 
the novelists, with the extreme possibilities of good 
and evil fortune, crime and disaster, heroism and 
attainment. For a life full of accident and adventure 
these stories furnished a body of precedent and case- 
law. Geoffrey Fenton, the English translator of 
Bandello, defends them on this ground. He calls the 
novels " that excellent treasury and full library of all 
knowledge," and says that they yield us " precedents 
for all cases that may happen ; both for imitation of 
the good, detesting the wicked, avoiding a present 
mischief, and preventing any evil afore it fall." " By 
the benefit of stories," he goes on, " presenting afore 
our eyes a true calendar of things of ancient date, by 
the commendation of virtuous and valiant persons and 
acts, we be drawn by desire to tread the steps of their 
renown. And, on the other side, considering the 
sinister fortune and horrible cases which have happened 
to certain miserable souls, we behold both the extreme 
points whereunto the frail condition of man is subject 
by infirmity ; and also are thereby taught, by the view 
of other men's harms, to eschew the like inconveniences 
in ourselves." These more serious aspects of the Italian 



164 SHAKESPEARE [chap, 

novel are reflected in Shakespeare's graver Comedies, 
especially in All ^s Well that Ends Well, which is based 
on a story of Boccaccio, and in Measure/or Measure, which 
borrows its plot from Cinthio. In these plays, as in 
The Merchant of Venice, questions of casuistry are at 
the root of the plot, and Shakespeare uses his theme 
in such a way as to suggest the lessons of his own 
subtle and profound morality. Both plays have been 
treated with some distaste by good critics, who 
have perhaps been repelled rather by the plots than 
by Shakespeare's handling of them. Of Measure for 
Measure Hazlitt says : " This is a play as full of 
genius as it is of wisdom. Yet there is an original 
sin in the nature of the subject, which prevents us 
from taking a cordial interest in it. . . . There is in 
general a want of passion ; the affections are at a 
stand ; our sympathies are repulsed and defeated in 
all directions." The feeling of repulsion is caused in 
part, no doubt, by the well-nigh intolerable dilemma 
which is the subject of the play. Of the alternatives 
presented to Isabella neither can be a matter for 
triumph ; and Shakespeare himself evades the con- 
sequences of the choice. But it is also true that in 
this play, as in some others, Shakespeare is too wide 
and strong, too catholic in his sympathies and too 
generous in his acceptance of facts, for the bulk of his 
readers. His suburbs are not their suburbs; nor is 
his morality their morality. Hazlitt himself, in the 
best word ever spoken on Shakespeare's morals, has 
given the explanation. " Shakespeare," he says, " was 
in one sense the least moral of all writers ; for morality 
(commonly so called) is made up of antipathies ; and 
his talent consisted in sympathy with human nature 
in all its shapes, degrees, depressions, and elevations." 
This is indeed the everlasting difficulty of Shake- 



v.] STORY AND CHARACTER 165 

speare criticism, tliat the critics are so mucli more 
moral than Shakespeare himself, and so much less 
experienced. He makes his appeal to thought, and 
they respond to the appeal by a display of delicate 
taste. Most of those who have written on Measure for 
Measure are of one mind with the " several shabby 
fellows" of Goldsmith's comedy; they are in a con- 
catenation with the genteel thing, and are unable 
to bear anything that is low. They cannot endure to 
enter such and such a place. They turn away their 
eyes from this or that person. They do not like to 
remember this or that fact. Their morality is made 
up of condemnation and avoidance and protest. 
What they shun in life they shun also in the drama, 
and so shut their minds to nature and to Shakespeare. 
The searching, questioning thought of the play does 
not find them out, and they are deaf to the commentary 
of the Duke : 

Thou art not noble, 
Por all the accommodations that thou bear'st 
Are nurs'd by baseness. . . . Thou art not thyself, 
Tor thou exist' St on many a thousand grains 
That issue out of dust. 

The ready judgments which are often passed on 
Shakespeare's most difficult characters and situations 
are like the talk of children. Childhood is amazingly 
moral, with a confident, dictatorial, unflinching 
morality. The work of experience, in those who are 
capable of experience, is to undermine this early 
pedantry, and to teach tolerance, or at least sus- 
pense of judgment. Nor is this an offence to virtue; 
rather virtue becomes an empty name, or fades into 
bare decorum, where sin is treated as a dark and 
horrible kind of eccentricity. 

In criticisms oi Measure for Measure, we are commonly 



166 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

presented with a picture of Vienna as a black pit of 
seething wickedness ; and against this background 
there rises the dazzling, white, and saintly figure of 
Isabella. The picture makes a good enough Christmas 
card, but it is not Shakespeare. If the humorous 
scenes are needed only, as Professor Dowden says, 
" to present without disguise or extenuation a world 
of moral licence and corruption," why are they 
humorous ? The wretches who inhabit the purlieus of 
the city are live men, pleasant to Shakespeare. 
Abhorson, the public executioner, is infamous by his 
profession, and is redeemed from infamy by his pride 
in it. When Pompey, who has followed a trade even 
lower in esteem, is offered to him as an assistant, his 
dignity rebels : " A bawd, Sir ? Pie upon him, he will 
discredit our mystery." Pompey himself, the irrele- 
vant, talkative clown, half a wit and half a dunce, is 
one of those humble, cheerful beings, willing to help 
in anything that is going forward, who are the main- 
stay of human affairs. Hundreds of them must do 
their daily work and keep their appointments, before 
there can be one great man of even moderate dimen- 
sions. Elbow, the thick-witted constable, own cousin 
to Dogberry, is no less dutiful. Proth is an amiable, 
feather-headed young gentleman — to dislike him 
would argue an ill nature, and a small one. Even 
Lucio has his uses ; nor is it very plain that in his 
conversations with the Duke he forfeits Shakespeare's 
sympathy. He has a taste for scandal, but it is a 
mere luxury of idleness ; though his tongue is loose, his 
heart is simply affectionate, and he is eager to help his 
friend. Lastly, to omit none of the figures who makeup 
the background. Mistress Overdone pays a strict atten- 
tion to business, and is carried to prison in due course of 
law. This world of Vienna, as Shakespeare paints it, 



v.] STORY AND CHARACTER 167 

is not a black world ; it is a weak world, full of little 
vanities and stupidities, regardful of custom, fond of 
pleasure, idle, and abundantly human. No one need go 
far to find it. On the other side, over against the 
populace, are ranged the officers of the government, 
who are more respectable, though hardly more ami- 
able. The Duke, a man of the quickest intelligence 
and sympathy, shirks his public duties, and plays the 
benevolent spy. He cannot face the odious necessities 
of his position. The law must be enforced, and the 
man who enforces it, putting off all those softer human 
qualities which are dearest to him, must needs maim 
himself, for the good of the social machine. So the 
Duke, like many a head of a family or college, tries 
to keep the love of the rebels by putting his ugly duties 
upon the shoulders of a deputy, and goes into exile 
to watch the case secretly from the opposition side. 
Shakespeare does not condemn him, but permits him 
to learn from the careless talk of Lucio that he has 
gained no credit by his default of duty. In his place 
is installed the strong man, the darling and idol of 
weak governments. The Lord Deputy, Angelo, is 
given sole authority, and is prepared to put down lust 
and licence with a firm hand, making law absolute, 
and maintaining justice without exception. His de- 
fence of the strict application of law, as it is set forth 
in his speeches to his colleague, Escalus, contains some 
of the finest and truest things ever said on that topic. 
He has no misgivings, and offers a convincing proof of 
the need for severity. 

So the train is laid. Quietly and naturally, out of 
ordinary human material, by the operation of the 
forces of every day, there is raised the mount on 
which Claudio and Isabella are to suffer their agony. 
A question of police suddenly becomes a soul's 



168 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

tragedy. Claudio is in love with Juliet. Her friends 
are opposed to the match, and there has been no 
marriage ceremony: meantime, the lovers have met 
secretly, and Juliet is with child by him. The solu- 
tion offered by Isabella is short and simple : " 0, let 
him marry her." But the new and stricter reign of 
law has begun, old penalties have been revived, and 
Claudio must die. There is no appeal possible to the 
Duke, who has disappeared ; and the one hope left is 
that Isabella may move the deputy to take pity on 
her brother. What she has to say is no answer to 
the reasons which have convinced Angelo that strict 
administration of the law is needful. The case con- 
templated has arisen, that is all. If, from tender 
consideration for the sinner, the law is to be defeated, 
will not the like considerations arise in every other 
case ? It is worth remarking that Shakespeare hardly 
makes use of the best formal and casuistical argu- 
ments employed by Cinthio's heroine. After pleading 
the youth and inexperience of her brother, and dis- 
coursing on the power of love, the lady of the novel 
takes up the point of legality. The deputy, she says, 
is the living law ; if his commands are merciful, they 
will still be legal. But the pleading of Isabella is 
for mercy as against the law. The logic of Angelo 
stands unshaken after her most eloquent assaults. He 
believes himself to be strong enough to do his duty ; 
he has suppressed in himself all sensual pity, but 
sense is not to be denied, and it overcomes him by an 
unexpected attack from another quarter. The beauty 
and grace of Isabella, pleading the cause of guilty love, 
stir desire in him ; and he propounds to her the dis- 
graceful terms whereby Claudio's life is to be saved 
at the expense of her honour. She does not, even in 
thought, entertain the proposal for an instant, but 



v.] STORY AND CHARACTER 169 

carries it to her brother in the prison, that her refusal 
maybe reinforced by his. At the first blush, he joins 
in her indignant rejection of it. But when his imagina- 
tion gets to work on the doom that is now certain, he 
pleads with her for his life. This is the last horror, 
and Isabella, in a storm of passion, withers Claudio by 
her contempt. " Let me ask my sister pardon," he says, 
when at last the Duke enters ; " I am so out of love 
with life that I will sue to be rid of it." The rest of 
the play is mere plot, devised as a retreat, to save the 
name of Comedy. 

Of all Shakespeare's plays, this one comes nearest to 
the direct treatment of a moral problem. What did 
he think of it all ? He condemns no one, high or low. 
The meaning of the play is missed by those who forget 
that Claudio is not wicked, merely human, and fails 
only from sudden terror of the dark. Angelo himself 
is considerately and mildly treated ; his hypocrisy is 
self-deception, not cold and calculated wickedness. 
Like many another man, he has a lofty, fanciful idea 
of himself, and his public acts belong to this imaginary 
person. At a crisis, the real man, surprises the play- 
actor, and pushes him aside. Angelo had under- 
estimated the possibilities of temptation : 

O cunning enemy, that to catch a saint 
With saints dost bait thy hook ! 

After the fashion of King Claudius in Hamlet, but 
with more sincerity, he tries to pray. It is useless ; 
his old ideals for himself are a good thing grown 
tedious. While he is waiting for the interview with 
Isabella, the blood rushes to his heart, like a crowd 
round one who swoons, or a multitude pressing to the 
audience of a king. The same giddiness is felt by 
Bassanio in the presence of Portia, and is described by 



170 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

Mm in almost the same figures. When the wickedness 
of Angelo is unveiled, Isabella is willing to make 
allowances for him : 

I partly think 
A due sincerity governed his deeds, 
Till he did look on me. 

But he is dismayed when he thinks of his fall, and 
asks for no allowance : 

So deep sticks it in my penitent heart, 

That I crave death more willingly than mercy ; 

'Tis my deserving, and I do entreat it. 

Shakespeare, it is true, does not follow the novel by- 
marrying him to Isabella, but he invents Mariana for 
him, and points him to happiness. 

Is the meaning of the play centred in the part of 
Isabella ? She is severe, and beautiful, and white with 
an absolute whiteness. Yet it seems that even she is 
touched now and again by Shakespeare's irony. She 
stands apart, and loses sympathy as an angel might 
lose it, by seeming to have too little stake in humanity : 

Then Isabel live chaste, and brother die ; 
More than our brother is our chastity. 

Perhaps it is the rhyming tag that gives to this a 
certain explicit and repulsive calmness : at the end of 
his scenes Shakespeare often makes his most cherished 
characters do the menial explanatory work of a chorus. 
He treats Cordelia no better, without the excuse, in 
this case, of a scene to be closed : 

For thee, oppressed king, I am cast down ; 
Myself could else outfrown false Fortune's frown. 

When we first make acquaintance with her, Isabella 
is on the eve of entering a cloister ; we overhear her 
talking to one of the sisters, and expressing a wish 



v.] STORY AND CHARACTER 171 

that a more strict restraint were imposed upon the 
order. She is an ascetic by nature, and some of the 
Duke's remarks on the vanity of self-regarding virtue, 
though they are addressed to Angelo, seem to glance 
delicately at her. Shakespeare has left us in no doubt 
concerning his own views on asceticism ; his poems 
and plays are full of eloquent passages directed against 
self -culture and the celibate ideal. In a wonderful line 
of A Midsummer NigMs Dream he pictures the sister- 
hood of the cloister — 

Chanting faint hymns to the cold fruitless moon. 

There is a large worldliness about him which makes 
him insist on the doctrine of usury. Virtue, he holds, 
is empty without beneficence : 

No man is the lord of anything, 
Till he communicate his parts to others. 

He goes further, and, in a great passage of Troilus 
and Cressida, teaches how worth and merit may not 
dare to neglect or despise their reflection in the esteem 
of men. No man can know himself save as he is known 
to others. Honour is kept bright by perseverance in 
action : love is the price of love. It is not by accident 
that Shakespeare calls Isabella back from the threshold 
of the nunnery, and after passing her through the 
furnace of trial, marries her to the Duke. She too, 
like Angelo, is redeemed for worldly uses ; and the 
seething city of Vienna had some at least of Shake- 
speare's sympathy as against both the true saint and 
the false. 

In this play there is thus no single character through 
whose eyes we can see the questions at issue as Shake- 
speare saw them. His OT\rn thought is interwoven in 
every part of it ; his care is to maintain the balance, 



172 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

and to show ns every side. He stands between the 
gallants of the playhouse and the puritans of the city ; 
speaking of charity and mercy to these ; to those assert- 
ing the reality of virtue in the direst straits, when 
charity and mercy seem to be in league against it. 
Even virtue, answering to a sudden challenge, alarmed, 
and glowing with indignation, though it is a beautiful 
thing, is not the exponent of his ultimate judgment. 
His attitude is critical and ironical, expressed in re- 
minders, and questions, and comparisons. When we 
seem to be committed to one party, he calls us back to 
a feeling of kinship with the other. He pleads for his 
creatures, as he pleads in the Sonnets for his friend: 

For to tliy sensual fault I bring in sense; 
Thy adverse party is thy Advocate. 

Measure for measure : the main theme of the play is 
echoed and re-echoed from speaker to speaker, and 
exhibited in many lights. " Plainly conceive, I love 
you,'' says Angelo ; and quick as lightning comes 
Isabella's retort : 

My brother did love Juliet ; and you tell me 
That he shall die for 't. 

The law is strict ; but the offence that it condemns is 
knit up with humanity, so that in choosing a single 
victim the law seems unjust and tyrannical. Authority 
and degree, place and form, the very framework of 
human society, are subjected to the same irony: 

Respect to your great place ; and let the devil 
Be sometime honour'd for his burning throne. 

The thought that was painfully working in Shake- 
speare's mind reached its highest and fullest expression 
in the cry of King Lear : 



v.] STORY AND CHARACTER 173 

None does offend, none, I say none ; I '11 able 'em ; 
Take that of me, my friend, who have the power 
To seal th' accuser's lips. 

Many men make acquaintance with Christian morality 
as a branch of codified law, and dutifully adopt it as a 
guide to action, without the conviction and. insight that 
are the fruit of experience. A few, like Shakespeare, 
discover it for themselves, as it was first discovered, by 
an anguish of thought and sympathy ; so that their 
words are a revelation, and the gospel is born anew. 

This wonderful sympathy, which, more than any 
other of his qualities, is the secret of Shakespeare's 
greatness, answers at once to any human appeal. 
With Laf eu, in All ^s Well, it says to Parolles, ^' Though 
you are a fool and a knave, you shall eat." It takes 
the road with the lighter-hearted hedgerow knave, 
Autolycus, and rejoices in his gains: ''I see this is 
the time that the unjust man doth thrive." It travels 
backwards through the ages, and revives the solemn 
heroic temper of the Roman world. It crosses the 
barrier of sex, and thinks the thoughts, and speaks 
the language, of women. 

Shakespeare's characters of women, as they are 
drawn even in his earliest plays, take us into a 
world unknown to his master Marlowe, with whom 
women are prizes or dreams. The many excellent 
essays that have been written on this topic make too 
much, perhaps, of individual differences among the 
heroines of the Comedies. Rosalind, Portia, Beatrice, 
Viola, are at least as remarkable for their similarities 
as for their differences. The hesitancy of Silvia, in 
The Two Gentlemen of Verona, when she returns his 
letter to Valentine, anticipates the shy speech of 
Portia to Bassanio, or of Beatrice to Benedick: "It 
were as possible for me," says Beatrice, " to say I 



174 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

loved nothing so well as you, but believe me not, and 
yet I lie not, I confess nothing, nor I deny nothing, I 
am sorry for my cousin." The scene, in the same play, 
where Julia makes a catalogue of her lovers for the 
criticism of Lucetta, is an earlier and fainter sketch 
of the conversation between Portia and Nerissa. Pope 
remarked that " every single character in Shakespeare 
is as much an individual as those in life itself ; it is 
as impossible to find any two alike. Had all the 
speeches," he continues, " been printed without the 
very names of the persons, I believe one might have 
applied them with certainty to every speaker." The 
remark is almost true as regards any single play ; but 
it would be a difficult task indeed to appropriate to 
their speakers all the wit-sallies of Beatrice and Eosa- 
lind, or to distinguish character in every line of their 
speeches. Yet all alike are women ; hardly anything 
that they speak in their own characters could have 
been spoken by men. It is possible to extract from 
the plays some kind of general statement which, if it 
be not universally true of women, is at least true of 
Shakespeare's women. They are almost all practical, 
impatient of mere words, clear-sighted as to ends and 
means. They do not accept the premises to deny the 
conclusion, or decorate the inevitable with imaginative 
lendings. " Never dream on infamy, but go," says the 
practical Lucetta to her mistress. When the steward 
in All 's Well comes to the Countess with a long tale 
about the calendar of his past endeavours, and the 
wound done to modesty by those who publish their 
own deservings, she cuts through his web of speech at 
a blow : " What does this knave here ? Get you gone, 
sirra : the complaints I have heard of you I do not all 
believe ; 't is my slowness that I do not." The same 
quickness of apprehension is seen in those many 



v.] STOEY AND CHARACTER 1,75 

passages where Shakespeare's women express their 
contempt for all the plausible embroidery of argu- 
ment. Hermione, like Volumnia, feels it a disgrace 
to be compelled "to prate and talk for life and 
honour." Imogen, persecuted by the attentions of 
Cloten, and compelled repeatedly to answer him, offers 
a dainty apology : 

I am much sorry, Sir, 
You put me to forget a lady's manners, 
By being so verbal. 

Virgilia is addressed by Coriolanus as " my gracious 
silence." Rosalind, Portia, Viola, though they are rich 
in witty and eloquent discourse, are frank and simple 
in thought ; never deceived by their own eloquence. 
" I '11 do my best," says Viola to the Duke, 

To woo your Lady : yet a barful strife, 
Whoe'er I woo, myself would be his wife. 

Helena in All -s Well — the chief example of the pur- 
suing woman who so often figures in the plays — has 
forfeited, by her practical energy and resource, the 
esteem of some sentimental critics. But she gains, in 
the end, the love of her husband, and the admiration 
of her maker. 

To multiply instances would be tedious. Shake- 
speare's men cannot, as a class, compare with his 
women for practical genius. They can think and 
imagine, as only Shakespeare's men can, but their 
imagination often masters and disables them. Self- 
deception, it would seem, is a male weakness. The 
whole controversy is summarised in the difference 
between Macbeth and his wife. She knows him well, 
and has no patience with his scruples and dally ings : 
What thou wouldst highly, 

That wouldst thou holily : wouldst not play false, 

And yet wouldst wrongly win. 



176 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

For her, all tlie details and consequences of tlie crime 
are accepted with, the crime itself. Her mind refuses 
to go behind the first crucial decision, or to waste 
precious time by speculating on the strangeness of 
things. But he, though he bends up each corporal 
agent to the terrible feat, cannot thus control the 
activities of his mind, or subdue them to a single 
practical end. His imagination will not be denied 
its ghastly play; he sees the murder as a single 
incident in the moving history of human woe, or 
forgets the need of the moment in the intellectual 
interest of his own sensations. When he acts, he 
acts in a frenzy which procures him oblivion. 

Because they do not ask questions of life, and do 
not doubt or deliberate concerning the fundamental 
grounds for action, Shakespeare's women are, in the 
main, either good or bad. The middle region of 
character, where mixed motives predominate, belongs 
chiefly to the men. The women act not on thought, 
but on instinct, which, once it is accepted, admits of 
no argument. The subtlety and breadth of Shake- 
speare's knowledge of feminine instinct cannot be 
overpraised. Celia, in As You Like It, is lightly 
sketched, yet how demure and tender she is, and how 
worldly-wise. When her cousin complains of the 
briars that fill this working-day world, she is ready 
with a feminine moral : " If we walk not in the 
trodden paths, our very petticoats will catch them." 
Rosalind's easy grace and voluble wit do not hide 
from sight those more delicate touches of nature, as 
when she half turns back to the victorious Orlando — 
" Did you call. Sir ? " — or breaks down, in the forest, 
at the sight of the blood-stained handkerchief, and 
utters the cry of a child : " I would I were at home." 
It is by small indications of this kind that Shake- 



v.] STORY AND CHARACTER 177 

speare convinces us of his knowledge. He has no 
general theory ; his women are often witty and 
daring, but they are never made all of wit and 
courage. Even Lady Macbeth' s courage fails her 
when the affections of her childhood strike across 
her memory : 

Had he not resembled 
My father as he slept, I had done't. 

Though she is magnificently rational and self-con- 
trolled at the crisis of the action, the recoil of the 
senses, which she had mastered in her waking 
moments, comes over her again in sleep : " Here 's 
the smell of the blood still; all the perfumes of 
Arabia will not sweeten this little hand." So un- 
erring is Shakespeare's intuition that he can sup- 
plement even Plutarch's narrative with wonderful 
additions of his own devising. There is nothing in 
the speech of Volumnia, the Eoman matron, more 
convincing and lifelike than the remonstrance which 
Shakespeare interpolates : 

Thou hast never in thy life 
Show'd thy dear mother any courtesy ; 
When she, poor hen, fond of no second brood, 
Has cluck' d thee to the wars, and safely home 
Loaden with honour. 

There is nothing in the behaviour of Cleopatra, the 
eternal courtesan, more characteristic than the de- 
liberate forwardness of mood which Shakespeare, in 
direct opposition to Plutarch's account, invents for 
her: 

If you find him sad, 

Say I am dancing ; if in mirth, report 

That I am sudden sick. 

When Charmian remarks that to gain and keep 



178 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

Antony's love it were better to cross him in nothing, 
Cleopatra impatiently retorts : 

Thou teachest like a fool : the way to lose him. 

Yet neither is Cleopatra a type ; she is her own un- 
paralleled self. Some distant relatives she has among 
the other plays. The lesson that she teaches to 
Charmian is a lesson which Cressida and Doll Tear- 
sheet also know by instinct : 

foolish Cressid : I might have still held off, 
And then you would have tarried. 

But Cressida is weaker, lighter, more wavering, than 
the tragic Queen who, when she hears that Antony 
has married Octavia, is wounded to the quick, and 
cries out : 

Pity me, Charmian ; 
But do not speak to me. 

And Doll Tearsheet, with only a small measure of the 
same craft, has the wealth of homely affection and 
plebeian good-fellowship which belongs to a lowlier 
world: "Come, I'll be friends with thee. Jack; thou 
art going to the wars, and whether I shall ever see 
thee again or no, there is nobody cares." Shakespeare, 
like Nature, is careful of the type ; but, unlike Nature, 
he cares even more for the life of the individual. 

With Ophelia, Desdemona, Cordelia, his art is yet 
more wonderful, for it works in fewer words. None 
of these characters is theorised ; none belongs to a type. 
Each is, in a sense, born of the situation, and inspired 
by it. The deserted maiden, the loyal wife, the 
daughter who becomes her father's protector — none of 
them has a thought or a feeling that forgets the situa- 
tion and her own part in it, so that all of them win 
the love of the reader by their very simplicity and 



v.] STORY AND CHARACTER 179 

intensity. If Shakespeare had been called on to draw 
generic portraits of those three types, he would have 
despised the attempt. On his theatre, as in life, 
character is made by opportunity, and welded to 
endurance by the blows of Fate. The most beautiful 
characters of his creation depend for their beauty on 
their impulsive response to the need of the moment. 
" Through the whole of the dialogue appropriated to 
Desdemona," says Mrs. Jameson, " there is not one 
general observation. Words are with her the vehicle 
of sentiment, and never of reflection." It may well be 
doubted whether Shakespeare was fully conscious of 
this. He worked from the heart outwards ; and his 
instinct fastened on the right words. An elaborate 
metaphor on Desdemona's lips would have shocked 
his sense of fitness, as, now that we know her, it would 
shock ours. The first greeting that she exchanges 
with Othello, when he lands at Cyprus, is of a piece 
with all that she says. ^^ 0, my fair warrior," says 
Othello, whose imagination, as well as his heart, is in 
her service. For Desdemona the unadorned truth 
is enough ; and she replies : " My dear Othello." 
Cordelia's most moving speeches are as simple as this. 
Ophelia is so real that differences of critical opinion 
concerning her throw light on nothing but the critics. 
Coleridge thought her the purest and loveliest of 
Shakespeare's women ; some other critics have cried 
out on her timidity and pettiness. If she could be 
brought to life, and introduced to her judges, these 
differences would no doubt persist. Fortunately, they 
are of comparatively little account ; when a fixed 
verdict on one of his characters is essential to Shake- 
speare's dramatic purpose, he does not leave his 
readers in doubt. 

The comparative simplicity of character which dis- 



180 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

tinguishes Shakespeare's women from his men is 
maintained thronghout the plays. Cleopatra, unlike 
Antony, is at one with herself, and entertains no 
divided counsels. Eegan and Goneril do not go 
motive-hunting, like lago 5 they are hard and cruel 
and utterly self-assured. They have the certainty 
and ease in action that Hamlet coveted : 

Witli wings as swift 
As meditation, or the thoughts of love, 
They sweep to their revenge. 

A similar confidence inspires the beautiful company 
of Shakespeare's self-devoted heroines. There is no 
Hamlet among them, no Jaques, no Biron. Their wit 
is quick and searching ; but it is wholly at the command 
of their will, and is never employed to disturb or 
destroy. Love and service are as natural to them as 
breathing. They are the sunlight of the plays, 
obscured at times by clouds and storms of melancholy 
and misdoing, but never subdued or defeated. In the 
Comedies they are the spirit of happiness ; in the 
Tragedies they are the only warrant and token of 
ultimate salvation, the last refuge and sanctuary of 
faith. If Othello had died blaspheming Desdemona, 
if Lear had refused to be reconciled with Cordelia, 
there would be good reason to talk of Shakespeare's 
pessimism. As it is, there is no room for such a 
discussion; in the wildest and most destructive 
tempest his sheet-anchors hold. 

The Historical plays occupy a middle place in the 
Tolio, and, in the process of Shakespeare's development, 
are a link between Comedy and Tragedy. Plays 
founded on English history were already popular when 
Shakespeare began to write ; and while he was still an 
apprentice, their tragic possibilities had been splendidly 



v.] STORY AND CHARACTER 181 

demonstrated in Marlowe's Edward II. He very early- 
turned his hand to them, and the exercise that they 
gave him steadied his imagination, and tanght him 
how to achieve a new solidity and breadth of repre- 
sentation. By degrees he ventured to intermix the 
treatment of high political affairs with familiar pictures 
of daily life, so that what might otherwise have seemed 
stilted and artificial was reduced to ordinary standards, 
and set against a background of verisimilitude and 
reality. His Comedy, timidly at first, and at last 
triumphantly, intruded upon his History ; his vision of 
reality was widened to include in a single perspective 
courts and taverns, kings and highwaymen, diplomatic 
conferences, battles, street brawls, and the humours of 
low life. He gave us the measure of his own magna- 
nimity in the two parts of Henry IV., a play of incom- 
parable ease, and variety, and mastery. Thence, 
having perfected himself in his craft, he passed on to 
graver themes, and, with Plutarch for his text-book, 
resuscitated the world-drama of the Eomans ; or 
breathed life into those fables of early British history 
which he found in Holinshed. His studies in English 
history determined his later dramatic career, and 
taught him the necromancer's art — 

To outran hasty time, retrieve the fates, 
Roll back the heavens, blow ope the iron gates 
Gf death and Lethe, where confused lie 
Great heaps of ruinous mortality. 

He revived dead princes and heroes, and set them in 
action on a stage crowded with life and manners. 

That love of incongruity and diversity which is 
the soul of a humorist had already manifested itself 
in his early comedies. The gossamer civilisation of 
the fairies is judged by Bottom the Weaver, who, in 



182 SHAKESPEAEE [chap. 

his turn, along with his rustic companions, must un- 
dergo the courtly criticism of Duke Theseus and the 
Queen of the Amazons. In Lovers Labour 's Lost, Romeo 
and Juliet, and As You Like It, to name no others, 
affairs of political import colour, by their neighbour- 
hood, the affections and fortunes of the lovers. But 
it is in the Historical plays that comedy is first perfectly 
blended with serious political interest. Shakespeare's 
instinct for reality, his suspicion of all that will not 
bear to be brought into contact with the gross elements, 
made him willing to use comedy and tragedy as a 
touchstone the one for the other. Nothing that is 
real in either of them can be damaged by the contact. 
It is the sham solemnity of grief that is impaired or 
broken by laughter, and the empty heartless jest that 
is made to seem inhuman by contrast with the sadness 
of mortal destiny. The tragic and the comic jostle 
each other in life : their separation is the work of 
ceremony, not of nature. A political people like the 
Greeks, with their passionate belief in the State, will 
impose their sense of public decorum upon the drama ; 
but the more irresponsible modern temper is not 
content to forgo the keen intellectual pleasure of 
paradox and contrast. The description of a funeral in 
Scott's Journal is a picture after the modern manner : 
" There is such a mixture of mummery with real grief 
— the actual mourner perhaps heart-broken, and all 
the rest raaking solemn faces, and whispering observa- 
tions on the weather and public news, and here and 
there a greedy fellow enjoying the cake and wine. 
To me it is a farce full of most tragical mirth.'' 
Shakespeare keeps the mirth and the tragedy close 
together, with no disrespect done to either. He 
narrates serious events, and portrays great crises in 
history, to the accompaniment of a comic chorus. He 



v.] STORY AND CHARACTER 183 

admits us to the King's secret thoughts, and lets us 
overhear the grumbling of the carriers in the innyard 
at Kochester. We witness the earl of Northumberland's 
passion over the death of his son, and sit in Justice 
Shallow's garden to talk of pippins and carraways. 
War is shown in its double aspect, as it appears to 
the statesman and to the recruiting-sergeant. For a 
last reach of boldness, the same characters are hurried 
through many diverse scenes, and the same events are 
exhibited in their greater and lesser effects. The for- 
tunes of the kingdom call the revellers away from the 
tavern. The Prince's royalty is not obscured under 
his serving-man's costume, nor is Sir John Falstaff's 
wit abated in the midst of death and battle. 

In Shakespeare's earlier historical work a certain 
formality and timidity of imagination make themselves 
felt. His bad kings, Richard the Third and John, 
are not wholly unlike the villains of melodrama. 
King Richard is an explanatory sinner : 

Therefore, since I cannot prove a lover, 
To entertain these fair well-spoken days, 
I am determined to prove a villain. 

King John, in his murderous instructions to Hubert, 
expresses a wish for the fitting stage effects, dark- 
ness, and the churchyard, and the sound of the 
jjas sing-bell. All this is far enough removed from 
the sureness of Shakespeare's later handling of similar 
themes. From the first he gave dramatic unity to 
his Histories by building them round the character 
of the king. To those who lived under the rule of 
Elizabeth, and whose fathers had been the subjects 
of Henry viii., it would have seemed a foolish paradox 
to maintain that the character of the ruler was a 
cause of small importance in the making of history. 



184 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

But these kings of the earlier plays are seen distantly, 
through a veil of popular superstition ; the full irony 
of the position is not yet realised; as if it were so 
easy to be a good king that nothing but a double dose 
of original sin can explain the failure. It was a great 
advance in method when Shakespeare, in Richard IL, 
brought the king to the ordinary human level, and 
set himself to conceive the position from within. 

Richard II. is among the Histories what Romeo and 
Juliet is among the Tragedies, an almost purely lyrical 
drama, swift and simple. Eichard is possessed by 
the sentiment of royalty, moved by a poet's delight 
in its glitter and pomp, and quick to recognise the 
pathos of its insecurity. There is nothing that we 
feel in contemplating his tragic fall which is not 
taught us by himself. Our pity for him, our sense 
of the cruelty of fate, are but a reflection of his own 
moving and subtle poetry. Weakness there is in him, 
but it hardly endears him the less ; it is akin to the 
weakness of Hamlet and of Falstaff, who cannot long 
concentrate their minds on a narrow practical problem ; 
cannot refuse themselves that sudden appeal to uni- 
versal considerations which is called philosophy or 
humour. Like them, Eichard juggles with thought 
and action : he is a creature of impulse, but when his 
impulse is foiled, he lightly discounts it at once by 
considering it in relation to the stars and the great 
scheme of things. What is failure, in a world where 
all men are mortal? Sometimes the beating of his 
own heart rouses him to fitful activity : 

Proud Bolingbroke, I come 
To change blows with thee for our day of doom. 

Then again he relapses into the fatalistic mood of 
thought, which he beautifies with humility : 



v.] STORY AND CHAIIACTER 185 

Strives Bolingbroke to be as great as we ? 
Greater he shall not be : if he serve God, 
We '11 serve him too, and be his fellow so. 

The language of resignation is natural to liim ; his 
weakness finds refuge in the same philosophic creed 
which is uttered defiantly, on the scaffold, by the hero 
of Chapman's tragedy : 

If I rise, to heaven I rise ; if fall, 
I likewise fall to heaven : what stronger faith 
Hath any of your souls ? 

It is difficult to condemn Richard without taking 
sides against poetry. He has a delicate and prolific 
fancy, which flowers into many dream-shapes in the 
prison; a wide and true imagination, which expresses 
itself in his great speech on the monarchy of Death ; 
and a deep discernment of tragic issues, which gives 
thrilling effect to his bitterest outcry : 

Though some of you, with Pilate, wash your hands, 
Showing an outward pity, yet you Pilates 
Have here deliver' d me to my sour cross, 
And water cannot wash away your sin. 

The mirror-scene at the deposition — which, like the 
sleep-walking scene in Macbeth, seems to have been 
wholly of Shakespeare's invention — is a wonderful 
summary and parable of the action of the play. The 
mirror is broken against the ground, and the armed 
attendants stand silent, waiting to take Eichard to the 
Tower. 

For all the intimacy and sympathy of the por- 
traiture, we are not permitted to lose sight of 
Richard's essential v/eakness. The greater part of 
the Third Act is devoted to showing, with much 
emphasis and repetition, how helpless and unstable he 



186 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

is at a crisis. If Richard was Shakespeare, as some 
critics have held, he was not the whole of Shakespeare. 
Even while the play was writing, the design for a 
sequel and contrast was beginning to take shape. The 
matter of the plays that were to follow is foreshadowed 
in the Queen's lamenting address to Eichard : 

Thou most beauteous inn, 
Why should hard-favour' d Grief be lodg'd in thee, 
When Triumph is become an ale-house guest ? 

Over against Eichard it was Shakespeare's plan to 
set, not the crafty and reserved Bolingbroke, but his 
son. King Henry v., the darling of the people, a lusty 
hero, open of heart and hand, unthrifty and dissolute 
in his youth, in his riper age the support and glory of 
the nation. The academy where the hero was to 
graduate was to be Shakespeare's own school, the life 
of the tavern and the street. 

It was a contrast of brilliant promise, and, if a choice 
must be made, it is not hard to determine on which 
side Shakespeare's fuller sympathies lay. The king 
who was equal to circumstance was the king for him. 
Yet Henry v., it may be confessed, is not so inwardly 
conceived as Eichard ii. His qualities are more 
popular and commonplace. Shakespeare plainly 
admires him, and feels towards him none of that 
resentment which the spectacle of robust energy 
and easy success produces in weaker tempers. If 
Henry v., as Prince and King, seems to fall short 
in some respects of the well-knit perfection that was 
intended, it is the price that he pays for incautiously 
admitting to his companionship a greater than himself, 
who robs him of his virtue, and makes him a satellite 
in a larger orbit. Less tragic than Eichard, less comic 
than Palstaff, the poor Prince is hampered on both 



v.] STORY AND CHARACTER 187 

sides, and confined to the narrower domain of practical 
success. 

From his first entrance Falstaff dominates the play. 
The Prince tries in vain to be even with him : Falstaff, 
as Hazlitt has said, is the better man of the two. He 
speaks no more than the truth when he makes his 
claim : '' I am not only witty in myself, but the cause 
that wit is in other men." All the best wit in the 
play is engineered and suggested by him ; even the 
Prince, when he tries to match him, falls under the 
control of the prime inventor, and makes the obvious 
and expected retorts, which give occasion for a yet 
more brilliant display of that surprising genius. It is 
the measure of the Prince's inferiority that to him 
Palstaff seems "rather ludicrous than witty," even 
while all the wit that passes current is being issued 
from Falstaff's mint, and stamped with the mark of 
his sovereignty. The disparity between the two char- 
acters extends itself to their kingdoms^ the Court and 
the Tavern. The one is restrained, formal, full of 
fatigues and necessities and ambitions ; the other is 
free and natural, the home of zest and ease. There 
are pretences in both, but with what a difference ! In 
the one there is real, hard, selfish hypocrisy and 
treachery ; in the other a world of make-believe and 
fiction, all invented for delight. It is no wonder that 
Falstaff attracts to himself the bulk of our sympathies, 
and perverts the moral issues. One critic, touched to 
the heart by the casting-off of Falstaff, so far forgets 
his morality as to take comfort in the reflection that 
the thousand pounds belonging to Justice Shallow is 
safe in Falstaff's pocket, and will help to provide for 
his old age. 

Yet the Prince, if he loses the first place in our 
affections, makes a brave fight for it. Shakespeare 



188 SHAKESPEAEE [chap. 

does what he can for him. He is valorous, generous, 
and high-spirited. When Falstaff claims to have slain 
Percy in single fight, he puts in no word for his own 

prowess : 

For my part, if a he may do thee grace, 
I '11 gild it with the happiest terms I have. 

He has some tenderness, and a deeply conceived sense 
of his great responsibilities. Even his wit would be 
remarkable in any other company, and his rich vocabu- 
lary of fancy and abuse speaks him a ready learner. 
If his poetry tends to rhetoric, in his instinct for prose 
and sound sense he almost matches the admirable 
Eosalind — " To say to thee that I shall die, is true ; 
but for thy love, by the Lord, no; yet I love thee, 
too." It is all in vain ; his good and amiable 
qualities do not teach him the way to our hearts. The 
"noble change" which he hath purposed, and of which 
we hear so much, taints him in the character of 
a boon-companion. He is double-minded: he keeps 
back a part of the price. Falstaff gives the whole of 
himself to enjoyment, so that the strivings and virtues 
of half-hearted sinners seem tame and poor beside him. 
He bestrides the play like a Colossus, and the young 
gallants walk under his huge legs and peep about to 
find themselves honourable graves. In all stress of 
circumstance, hunted by misfortune and disgrace, he 
rises to the occasion, so that the play takes on the 
colour of the popular beast-fable ; our chief concern is 
that the hero shall never be outwitted ; and he never is. 
There is more of Shakespeare in this amazing 
character than in all the poetry of Richard II. Falstaff 
is a comic Hamlet, stronger in practical resource, and 
hardly less rich in thought. He is in love with life, 
as Hamlet is out of love with it ; he cheats and lies 
and steals with no hesitation and no afterthought ; he 



v.] STORY AND CHARACTER 189 

runs away or counterfeits death with more courage 
than others show in deeds of knightly daring. The 
accidents and escapades of his life give ever renewed 
occasion for the triumph of spirit over matter, and 
show us the real man, above them all, and aloof from 
them, calm, aristocratic, fanciful, scorning opinion, 
following his own ends, and intellectual to the finger- 
tips. He has been well called " a kind of military 
freethinker.'' He will fight no longer than he sees 
reason. His speech on honour might have been spoken 
by Hamlet — with what a different conclusion ! He is 
never for a moment entangled in the web of his own 
deceits ; his mind is absolutely clear of cant ; his self- 
respect is m^agnificent and unfailing. The judgments 
passed on him by others, kings or justices, affect him 
not at all, while there are few of these others who can 
escape with credit from the severe ordeal of his dis- 
interested judgment upon them. The character of 
Master Shallow is an open book to that impartial 
scrutiny. " It is a wonderful thing," says Ealstaff, " to 
see the semblable coherence of his men's spirits and 
his : they, by observing of him, do bear themselves like 
foolish justices ; he, by conversing with them, is turn'd 
into a justice-like serving-man." Yet, for all his clarity 
of vision, Falstaff is never feared ; there is no grain of 
malevolence in him ; wherever he comes he brings with 
him the pure spirit of delight. 

How was a character like this to be disposed of? 
He had been brought in as an amusement, and had 
rapidly established himself as the chief person of the 
play. There seemed no reason why he should not go 
on for ever. He was becoming dangerous. No serious 
action could be attended to while every one was wait- 
ing to see how Falstaff would take it. A clear stage 
was needed for the patriotic and warlike exploits of 



190 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

King Harry ; here was to be no place for critics and 
philosophers. Shakespeare disgraces Falstaft', and 
banishes him from the Court. But this was not 
enough ; it was a part of Falstaff's magnanimity that 
disgrace had never made the smallest difference to 
him, and had often been used by him as a stepping- 
stone to new achievement. Even in banishment he 
was likely to prove as dangerous as ISTapoleon in Elba. 
There was nothing for it ; in the name of the public 
safety, and to protect him. from falling into bad hands, 
Falstaff must be put to death. So he takes his last 
departure, " an it had been any christom child," and 
King Harry is set free to pursue the life of heroism. 

With the passing of Falstaff Shakespeare's youth was 
ended. All that wonderful experience of London life, 
all those days and nights of freedom and adventure 
and the wooing of new pleasures, seem to be embodied 
in this great figure, the friend and companion of the 
young. We can trace his history, from his first boy- 
hood, when he broke Scogan's head at the court gate, 
to his death in the second childhood of delirium. He 
was never old. " What, ye knaves," he cries, at the 
assault on the Gadshill travellers, " young men must 
live." "You that are old," he reminds the Chief 
Justice, " consider not the capacities of us that are 
young." The gods, loving him, decreed that he should 
die as he was born, with a white head and a round 
belly, in the prime of his joyful days. 

He was brought to life again, by Eoyal command, 
in The Merry Wives of Windsor \ but his devoted 
admirers have never been able to accept that play for 
a part of his history. The chambering and wanton- 
ness of amorous intrigue suits ill with his indomitable 
pride of spirit. It is good to hear the trick of his 
voice again ; and his wit has not lost all its brightness. 



v.] STORY AND CHARACTER 191 

But he is fallen and changed ; he has lived to stand at 
the taunt of one that makes fritters of English, and is 
become the butt of citizens and their romping wives. 
Worst of all, he is afraid of the fairies. Bottom the 
weaver never fell so low — " Scratch my head, Pease- 
blossom." Shakespeare has an ill conscience in this 
matter, and endeavours to salve it by a long apology. 
" See now," says Ealstaff, " how wit may be made a 
Jack-a-lent, when 't is upon ill employment." But 
such an apology is worse than the offence. It presents 
Falstaff to us in the guise of a creeping moralist. 

The historical plays, English and Eoman, have often 
been used as evidence of their author's political 
opinions. These opinions have, perhaps, been too 
rashly formulated ; yet it cannot be denied that cer- 
tain definite and strong impressions have been made 
by the plays on critics of the most diverse leanings. 
It is safe to say that Shakespeare had a very keen 
sense of government, its utility and necessity. If he 
is not a partisan of authority, he is at least a 
passionate friend to order. His thought is every- 
where, the thought of a poet, and he views social 
order as part of a wider harmony. A^Tien his imagina- 
tion seeks a tragic climax, the ultimate disaster and 
horror commonly presents itself to him as chaos. His 
survey of human society and of the laws that bind 
man to man is astronomical in its rapidity and 
breadth. So it is in the curse uttered by Timon : 

Piety, and fear, 
Religion to the Gods, peace, justice, truth, 
Domestic awe, night-rest, and neighbourhood, 
Instruction, manners, mysteries, and trades, 
Degrees, observances, customs, and laws, 
Decline to your confounding contraries, 
And let confusion live. 



192 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

So it is also in the great speech of Ulysses, and in 
half a score of passages in the Tragedies. He extols 
government with a fervour that suggests a real and 
ever-present fear of the breaking of the flood-gates ; he 
delights in government, as painters and musicians 
delight in composition and balance. 

As to the merits of differing forms of government, 
that question was hardly a live one in ■ the reign of 
Elizabeth, and seems not to have exercised Shake- 
speare's thought. In Julius Caesar, where the sub- 
ject gave him his chance, he accepts Plutarch for 
his guide, and does not digress into political theory. 
It has often been said that he dislikes and distrusts 
crowds. Certainly the common people, in Henry VI., 
and Julius Caesar, and Coriolanus, are made ludicrous 
and foolish. But after all, a love for crowds and a 
reverence for mob-orators are not so often found among 
dispassionate thinkers as to make Shakespeare's case 
strange; audit is always to be remembered that he 
was a dramatist. His point of view was given him 
by the little group of his principal characters, and 
there was no room for the people save as a fluctuat- 
ing background or a passing street-show. We do not 
see Cade at home. Where the feelings of universal 
humanity fall to be expressed, caste and station are 
of no account ; Macduff, a noble, bereaved of his 
children, speaks for all mankind. 

Nevertheless, the impression persists, that here, and 
here alone, Shakespeare exhibits some partiality. It 
was natural enough that his political opinions should 
take their colour from his courtly companions, whose 
business was politics ; nor was his own profession likely 
to alter his sympathies. A¥ho should know the weak- 
nesses and vanities of the people better than a 
theatrical manager ? There is no great political signi- 



T.] STORY AND CHARACTER 193 

ficance in the question ; the politics of the plays were 
never challenged till America began to read human 
history by the light of her own self-consciousness. 
It is true that Shakespeare is curiously impatient 
of dulness, and that he pays scant regard, and does 
no justice, to men of slow wit. He never emancipated 
himself completely from the prejudices of verbal edu- 
cation : to be a stranger to all that brilliant craftsman- 
ship and all those subtle dialectical processes which had 
given him so much pleasure was to forfeit some hold on 
his sympathy. His clowns and rustics are often the 
merest mechanisms of comic error and verbose irrel- 
evance. In this respect he is worlds removed from 
Chaucer, who understands social differences as Shake- 
speare never did, and to whom, therefore, social dif- 
ferences count for less. How wholly real and human 
Dogberry or Verges, Polonius or Lady Capulet, would 
have been in Chaucer's way of handling ! The Eeeve, 
in the Cayiterhury Tales, is a man of the people, an 
old man and a talkative, but his simple philosophy 
of life has a breadth and seriousness that cannot 
be matched among Sha^kespeare's tradesfolk. Yet, 
even here, some allowance must be made for the 
necessities of dramatic presentation, and for the time- 
honoured conventions of romantic method. The 
eternal truths of human nature are not the less 
true because they are illustrated in the person of a 
king. 

In the great Tragedies Shakespeare comes at last 
face to face with the mystery and cruelty of human 
life. He had never been satisfied with the world of 
romance, guarded like a dream from all external 
violence; and his plays, when they are arranged in 
order, exhibit the gradual progress of the invasion of 
reality. At first he gently and humorously suggests the 



194 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

contrast: the most lifelike characters in the earlier plays 
are often those which are invented and added by him- 
self. Jaques and Touchstone, Mercutio and the Nurse, 
Sir Toby Belch and Malvolio, represent the encroach- 
ments of daily life, in all its variety, on the symmetry 
of a romantic plot. The bastard Faulconbridge and 
Falstaff are the spirit of criticism, making itself at 
home among the formalities of history. But in the 
great Tragedies the most fully conceived characters 
are no longer supernumeraries ; they are the heart of 
the play. Hamlet is both protagonist and critic. The 
passion of Lear and Othello and Macbeth is too real, 
too intimately known, to gain or lose by contrast : the 
very citadel of life is shaken and stormed by the 
onslaught of reality. We are no longer saved by a 
mere trick, as in The Merchant of Venice ot Measure for 
Measure-, there is no hope of a reprieve; the worst 
that can befall has happened, and we are stretched on 
the rack, beyond the mercy of narcotics, our eyes open 
and our senses preternaturally quickened, to endure 
till the end. 

There was a foreboding of this even in the happiest 
of the early plays, a gentle undertone of melancholy, 
which added poignancy to the happiness by reminding 
us of the insecurity of mortal things. The songs sung 
by the Clown in Twelfth Night are an exquisite example : 

What is love ? 'T is not liereafter ; 
Present mirth hath present laughter : 
What 's to come is still unsure. 

Translated into the language of tragedy, these lines 
tell the story of Antony and Cleopatra. The concluding 
song — 

When that I was and a little tiny boy, 
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain, — 



v.] STORY AND CHARACTER 195 

has some of the forlorn pathos of King Lear. The rain 
that raineth every day, the men who shut their gates 
against knaves and thieves, the world that began a 
great while ago, are like disconnected dim memories, 
or portents, troubling the mind of a child. In the 
Tragedies they come out of the twilight, and are hard 
and real in the broad light of day. We have been 
accustomed to escape from these miseries by waking, 
but now the last terror confronts us : our dream has 
come true. 

When Shakespeare grappled with the ultimate 
problems of life he had the help of no talisman or 
magic script. Doctrine, theory, metaphysic, morals, — 
how should these help a man at the last encounter ? 
Men forge themselves these weapons, and glory in 
them, only to find them an encumbrance at the hour 
of need. Shakespeare's many allusions to philosophy 
and reason show how little he trusted them. It is the 
foolish Master Slender and the satirical Benedick who 
profess that their love is governed by reason. 

The will of man is by his reason sway'd, 

says Lysander, in A Midsummer JSfighfs Dream, even 
while he is the helpless plaything of the fairies. 
Where pain and sorrow come, reason is powerless, 
good counsel turns to passion, and philosophy is put to 
shame : 

I pray thee, peace ! I will be flesh and blood ; 
For there was never yet Philosopher 
That could endure the tooth-ache patiently, 
However they have writ the style of Gods, 
And made a push at chance and sufferance. 

It is therefore vain to seek in the plays for a philo- 
sophy or doctrine which may be extracted and set out 
in brief. Shakespeare's philosophy was the philosophy 



196 SHAKESPEAEE [chap. 

of the shepherd Corin: he knew that the more one 
sickens, the worse at ease he is, that the property of 
rain is to wet, and of fire to burn. King Lear when 
he came by the same knowledge, saw through the 
flatteries and deceits on which he had been fed — " They 
told me I was everything ; ^t is a lie, I am not ague- 
proof." All doctrines and theories concerning the 
place of man in the universe, and the origin of evil, 
are a poor and partial business compared with that 
dazzling vision of the pitiful estate of humanity which 
is revealed by Tragedy. 

The vision, as it was seen by Shakespeare, is so 
solemn, and terrible, and convincing in its reality, that 
there are few, perhaps, among his readers who have 
not averted or covered their eyes. " I might relate," 
says Johnson, " that I was many years ago so shocked 
by Cordelia's death, that I know not whether I ever 
endured to read again the last scenes of the play 
till I undertook to revise them as an editor." For 
the better part of a century the feelings of playgoers 
were spared by alterations in the acting version. With 
readers of the play other protective devices have found 
favour. These events, they have been willing to 
believe, are a fable designed by Shakespeare to 
illustrate the possible awful consequences of error and 
thoughtlessness. Such things never happened ; or, if 
they happened, at least we can be careful, and they 
never need happen again. So the reader takes re- 
fuge in morality, from motives not of pride, but of 
terror, because morality is within man's reach. The 
breaking of a bridge from faulty construction excites 
none of the panic fear that is produced by an earth- 
quake. 

But here we have to do with an earthquake, and 
good conduct is of no avail. Morality is not denied ; 



V.J STOllY AND CHARACTER 197 

it is overwlielmed and tossed aside by tlie inmsli of the 
sea. There is no moral lesson to be read, except 
accidentally, in any of Shakespeare's tragedies. They 
deal with greater things than man; with powers and 
passions, elemental forces, and dark abysses of suffer- 
ing ; with the central fire, which breaks through the 
thin crust of civilisation, and makes a splendour in the 
sky above the blackness of ruined homes. Because he 
is a poet, and has a true imagination, Shakespeare 
knows how precarious is man's tenure of the soil, 
how deceitful are his quiet orderly habits and his 
prosaic speech. At any moment, by the operation of 
chance, or fate, these things may be broken up, and 
the world given over once more to the forces that 
struggled in chaos. 

It is not true to say that in these tragedies character 
is destiny. Othello is not a jealous man; he is a 
man carried off his feet, wave-drenched and blinded by 
the passion of love. Macbeth is not a murderous 
politician ; he is a man possessed. Lear no doubt has 
faults ; he is irritable and exacting, and the price that 
he pays for these weaknesses of old age is that they let 
loose hell. Hamlet is sensitive, thoughtful, generous, 
impulsive, — " a pure, noble, and most moral nature " — 
yet he does not escape the extreme penalty, and at the 
bar of a false criticism he too is made guilty of the 
catastrophe. But Shakespeare, who watched his 
heroes, awestruck, as he saw them being drawn into 
the gulf, passed no such judgment on them. In his 
view of it, what they suffer is out of all proportion to 
what they do and are. They are presented with a 
choice, and the essence of the tragedy is that choice is 
impossible. Coriolanus has to choose between the pride 
of his country and the closest of human affections. 
Antony stands poised between love and empire. 



198 SHAKESPEAEE [chap. 

Macbeth commits a foul crime ; but Shakespeare's 
tragic stress is laid on the hopelessness of the dilemma 
that follows, and his great pity for mortality makes the 
crime a lesser thing. Hamlet fluctuates between the 
thought which leads nowhither and the action which is 
narrow and profoundly unsatisfying. Brutus, like 
Coriolanus, has to choose between his highest political 
hopes and the private ties of humanity. Lear's mis- 
doing is forgotten in the doom that falls upon him ; 
after his fit of jealous anger he awakes to find that he 
has no further choice, and is driven into the wilderness, 
a scapegoat for mankind. Othello — but the story of 
Othello exemplifies a further reach of Shakespeare's 
fearful irony — Othello, like Hamlet, suffers for his very 
virtues, and the noblest qualities of his mind are made 
the instruments of his crucifixion. A very brief 
examination of these two plays must serve in place of 
a fuller commentary. 

The character of Hamlet has been many times dis- 
cussed, and the opinions expressed may, for the most 
part, be ranged in two opposing camps. Some critics 
have held, with Goethe and Coleridge, that Hamlet is 
Shakespeare's study of the unpractical temperament ; 
the portrait of a dreamer. Others, denying this, have 
called attention to his extraordinary courage and 
promptitude in action. He follows the Ghost without 
a moment's misgiving, in spite of his companions' 
warnings. He kills Polonius out of hand, and, when 
he finds his mistake, brushes it aside like a fly, to 
return to the main business. He sends Eosencrantz 
and Guildenstern to their death with cool despatch, 
and gives them a hasty epitaph : 

'T is dangerous when the baser nature comes 
Between the pass and fell incensed points 
Of mighty opposites. 



v.] STORY AND CHARACTER 199 

111 the sea-figlit, we are told, he was the first to board 
the pirate vessel. And nothing in speech could be 
more pointed, practical, and searching, than his rapid 
cross-examination of Horatio concerning the appearance 
of the Ghost. Some of those who lay stress on these 
things go further, and maintain that Hamlet succeeds 
in his designs. His business was to convince himself 
of the King's guilt, and to make open demonstration of 
it before all Denmark. When these things are done, 
he stabs the King, and though his own life is taken by 
treachery, his task is accomplished, now that the story 
of the murder cannot be buried in his grave. 

Yet when we read this or any other summary of the 
events narrated, we feel that it takes us far from the 
real theme of the play. A play is not a collection of 
the biographies of those who appear in it. It is a 
grouping of certain facts and events round a single 
centre, so that they may be seen at a glance. In this 
play that centre is the mind of Hamlet. We see with 
his eyes, and think his thoughts. When once we are 
caught in the rush of events we judge him no more 
than we judge ourselves. Almost all that has ever 
been said of his character is true ; his character is so 
live and versatile that it presents many aspects. What 
is untrue is the common assumption that his character 
is a chief cause of the dramatic situation, and that 
Shakespeare intends us to judge it by the event — that 
the play, in short, is a Moral Play, like one of Miss 
Edgeworth's stories. A curiously businesslike vein of 
criticism runs through essays and remarks on Hamlet. 
There is much talk of failure and success. A ghost has 
told him to avenge the murder of his father ; why does 
he not do his obvious duty, and do it at once, so that 
everything may be put in order ? His delay, it has 
sometimes been replied, is justified by his desire to do 



200 SHAKESPEARE ' [chap. 

his duty in a more effective and workmanlike fashion. 
The melancholy Prince has certainly not been able to 
infect all who read his story with his own habit of 
thought. 

If the government of the State of Denmark were 
one of the issues of the play, there would be a better 
foothold for those practical moralists. But the State 
of Denmark is not regarded at all, except as a topical 
and picturesque setting for the main interest. The 
tragedy is a tragedy of private life, made conspicuous 
by the royal station of the chief actors in it. Before 
the play opens, the deeds which make the tragedy 
inevitable have already been done. They are revealed 
to us only as they are revealed to Hamlet. His 
mother's faithlessness has given him cause for deep 
unrest and melancholy; he distrusts human nature 
and longs for death. Then the murder is made known 
to him. He sees the reality beneath the plausible 
face of things, and thenceforth the Court of Elsinore 
becomes for him a theatre where all the powers of the 
universe are contending : 

all you host of Heaven ! Earth ! What else ? 
And shall I couple Hell ? fie : hold, my heart ; 
And you, my sinews, grow not instant old, 

But bear me stiffly up. 

It is no wonder that his friends and companions think 
him mad ; he has seen and known what they cannot 
see and know, and a barrier has risen between him 
and them : 

1 hold it fit that we shake hands and part ; 

You, as your business and desires shall point you; 
Eor every man has business and desire, 
Such as it is : and for mine own poor part, 
Look you, I '11 go pray. 



v.] STORY AND CHARACTER 201 

The world has become a mockery under the glare of 
a single fact. The idea of his mother's perfidy colours 
all his words and thoughts. The very word " mother " 
is turned into a name of evil note : " wonderful 
son, that can so astonish a mother.'' So also in Troilus 
and Cressida, the springs of humanity are poisoned for 
Troilus by the falseness of Cressida — " Think, we had 
mothers." The slower imagination of Ulysses cannot 
follow the speed of this argument. When he asks, 
''What hath she done, Prince, that can soil our 
mothers ? " Troilus replies, with all the condensed irony 
of Hamlet, ''Nothing at all, unless that this were 
she." To Hamlet, in the bitterness of his discovery, 
the love of Ophelia is a snare ; yet there is a tragic 
touch of gentleness in his parting from her. The 
waters of destruction are out ; she may escape them, 
if she will. She is innocent as yet, why should she be 
a breeder of sinners ? Let her flee from the wrath to 
come — " To a nunnery, go ! " 

It is observed by Coleridge that in Hamlet the 
equilibrium between the real and the imaginary 
worlds is disturbed. Just such a disturbance, so to 
call it, is produced by any great shock given to feel- 
ing, by bereavement or crime breaking in upon the 
walled serenity of daily life and opening vistas into 
the infinite expanse, where only the imagination can 
travel. The horizon is widened far bej^ond the 
narrow range of possible action ; the old woes of the 
world are revived, and pass like shadows before the 
spellbound watcher. What Hamlet does is of little 
importance ; nothing that he can do would avert the 
tragedy, or lessen his own agony. It is not by what 
he does that he appeals to us, but by what he sees and 
feels. Those who see less think him mad. But the 
King who, in a different manner, has access to what 



202 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

is passing in Hamlet's mind, knows that he is danger- 
ously sane. 

The case of Hamlet well illustrates that old- 
fashioned psychology which divided the mind of man 
into active and intellectual powers. Every one who has 
ever felt the stress of sudden danger must be familiar 
with the refusal of the intellect to subordinate itself 
wholly to the will. Even a drowning man, if report 
be true, often finds his mind at leisure, as though he 
were contemplating his own struggles from a distance. 
Action and contemplation are usually separated in the 
drama, for the sake of clearness, and are embodied in 
different persons. But they are not separated in life, 
nor in the character of Hamlet. His actions surprise 
himself. His reason, being Shakespeare's reason, is 
superb in its outlook, and sits unmoved above the 
strife. Thus, while all that he says is characteristic 
of him, some of it is whimsical, impulsive, individual, 
a part of the action of the play, while others of his 
sayings seem to express the mind that he shares with 
his creator, and to anticipate the reflections of an 
onlooker. 

It is not from the weakness of indecision that 
Hamlet so often pays tribute to the forces which lie 
beyond a man's control. Of what he does rashly he 
says: 

And praised be rashness for it, let us know 

Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well, 

When our dear plots do pall ; and that should teach us, 

There 's a Divinity that shapes our ends, 

Rough-hew them how we will. 

When Horatio tries to dissuade him from the fencing- 
match, he replies : " Not a whit ; we defy augury ; 
there 's a special Providence in the fall of a sparrow." 



y.] STOBY AND CHARACTER 203 

In these comments lie speaks the mind of the 
dramatist. A profound sense of fate underlies all 
Shakespeare's tragedies. Sometimes he permits his 
characters, Komeo or Hamlet, to give utterance to it ; 
sometimes he prefers a subtler and more ironical method 
of exposition. lago and Edmund, alone among the per- 
sons of the great tragedies, believe in the sufficiency 
of man to control his destinies. " Virtue ! a fig ! " says 
lago ; " 't is in ourselves that we are thus or thus." It 
is " the excellent foppery of the world," says Edmund, 
that "we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the 
moon, and the stars." The event is Shakespeare's only 
reply to these two calculators. His criticism is con- 
tained in the event, which often gives a thrill of new 
meaning to the speeches of the unconscious agents. 
This classical irony, as it is called, which plays with 
the ignorance of man, and makes him a prophet in 
spite of himself, is an essential part of Shakespeare's 
tragic method. The voice of the prophecy is heard in 
Eomeo's speech to the Eriar : 

Do thou but close our hands with holy words, 
Then love-devouring death do what he dare ; 
It is enough I may but call her mine. 

It is heard again in the last words ever spoken by 
Juliet to her lover : 

Methinks I see thee, now thou art so low, 
As one dead in the bottom of a tomb ; 
Either my eyesight fails, or thou look'st pale. 

It runs all through Othello, so that only a repeated 
reading of the play can bring out its full meaning. 
The joyful greetings of Othello and Desdemona in 
Cyprus are ominous in every line. " If it were now 
to die," says Othello, " 't were now to be most happy." 
His words are truer than he knows. 



204 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

Without this sense of fate, this appreciation of the 
tides that bear man with them, whether he swim this 
way or that, tragedy would be impossible. Othello is 
in many ways Shakespeare's supreme achievement — 
in this among others, that he gives tragic dignity to a 
squalid story of crime by heightening the characters 
and making all the events inevitable. The moralists 
have been eager to lay the blame of these events on 
Othello, or Desdemona, or both ; but the whole mean- 
ing of the play would vanish if they were successful. 
Shakespeare is too strong for them ; they cannot 
make headway against his command of our sympa- 
thies. In Othello he portrays a man of a high and 
passionate nature, ready in action, generous in thought. 
Othello has lived all his life by faith, not by sight. He 
cannot observe and interpret trifles ; his way has been 
to brush them aside and ignore them. He is im- 
patient of all that is subtle and devious, as if it 
were a dishonour. Jealousy and suspicion, as Desde- 
mona knows, are foreign to his nature ; he credits 
others freely with all his own noblest qualities. He 
hates even the show of concealment; when lago 
urges him to retire^ to escape the search-party of 
Brabantio, he replies : 

Not I : I must be found. 
My parts, my title, and my perfect soul 
Shall manifest me rightly. 

If he were less credulous, more cautious and alert and 
observant, he would be a lesser man than he is, and less 
worthy of our love. 

His unquestioning faith in Desdemona is his life — 
what if his faith fail him ? The temptation attacks 
him on his blind side. He knows nothing of those 
dark corners of the mind where the meaner passions 



v.] STORY AND CHARACTER 206 

germinate. The man who comes to him is one whom 
he has always accepted for the soul of honesty and 
good comradeship, a trusted friend and familiar, re- 
luctant to speak, quite disinterested, free from passion, 
highly experienced in human life, all honour and 
devotion and delicacy, — for so lago appeared. The 
game of the adversary was won when Othello first 
listened. He should have struck lago, it may be said, 
at the bare hint, as he smote the turban'd Turk in 
Aleppo. lago was well aware of this danger, and bent 
all the powers of his mind to the crisis. He gives his 
victim no chance for indignation. Any one who would 
take the measure of Shakespeare's almost superhuman 
skill when he rises to meet a difficulty should read the 
Third Act of Othello. The quickest imagination ever 
given to man is there on its mettle, and racing. There 
is a horrible kind of reason on Othello's side when he 
permits lago to speak. He knew lago, or so he be- 
lieved ; Desdemona was a fascinating stranger. Her 
unlikeness to himself was a part of her attraction ; his 
only tie to her was the tie of instinct and faith. 

Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul 
When hot for certainties in this our life ! 

Once he begins to struggle with thought, he is in 
the labyrinth of the monster, and the day is lost. 

If Othello is simple as a hero, Desdemona is simple 
as a saint. From first to last, while she is uncon- 
sciously knotting the cords around her, there is no 
trace, in any speech of hers, of caution or self- 
regard. She is utterly trustful; she gives herself 
away, as the saying is, a hundred times. She is insis- 
tent, like a child ; but she never defends herself, and 
never argues. To the end, she simply cannot believe 
that things are beyond recovery by the power of love ; 



206 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

after the worst scene of all she still trusts the world, 
and sleeps. Those misguided and unhappy formalists 
who put her in the witness-box of a police-court, and 
accuse her of untruth, should be forbidden to read 
Shakespeare. She was heavenly true. Her answer 
concerning the handkerchief — "It is not lost: but 
what and if it were?"— is a pathetic and childlike 
attempt to maintain the truth of her relation to her 
husband. How can she know that she is at the bar 
before a hostile judge, and that her answer will be used 
against her ? If she knew, she would refuse to plead. 
Othello's question is false in all its implications, which 
appear vaguely and terribly in his distraught manner. 
The mischief is already done : in her distress and be- 
wilderment she clutches at words which express one 
truth at least, the truth that she has done him no 
wrong. Sir Walter Scott, it may be remembered, with 
infinitely less at stake, used almost Desdemona's form 
of words in reply to the question whether he was the 
author of the Waverley Novels. 

If Desdemona had accepted the inhumanity of the 
position, and, on general grounds of principle, had 
replied by a statement of the bare fact, she might be 
a better lawyer in her own cause, but she would forfeit 
her angel's estate. So also, at those many points in 
the play where a cool recognition of her danger and a 
determination to be explicit might have saved her, 
we cannot wish that she should so save herself. She 
is tactless, it is said, in her solicitations on behalf of 
Cassio ; but it is the tactlessness of unfaltering faith. 
When anger and suspicion intrude upon her paradise 
she cannot deal with them reasonably, as those can who 
expect them. She is a child to chiding, as she says 
to Emilia : and a child that shows tact and calmness 
in managing its elders is not loved the better for it, 



v.] STORY AND CHARACTER 207 

' The simplicity and purity of these two characters 
give to lago the material of his crafti The sovereign 
skill of that craft, and his artist's delight in it, have 
procured him worship, so that he has been enthroned 
as a kind of evil God. But if no such man ever 
existed, yet the elements of which he is composed are 
easy to find in ordinary life. All the cold passions of 
humanity are compacted in his heart. His main motives 
are motives of every day — pride in self, contempt for 
others, delight in irresponsible power. In any human 
society it may be noted how innocence and freedom 
win favour by their very ease, and it may be noted 
also how they arouse a certain sense of hostility in 
more difficult and grudging spirits. lago is not an 
empty dream. But if goodness is sometimes stupid, so 
is wickedness. lago can calculate, but he takes no 
account of the self-forgetful passions. He is surprised 
by Othello's great burst of pity; when Desdemona 
kneels at his feet and implores his help to regain her 
husband's affection, his words seem to betoken some 
embarrassment, and he makes haste to end the inter- 
view. He does not understand any one with whom 
he has to deal ; not Othello, nor Desdemona, nor 
Cassio, nor his own wife Emilia, and this last mis- 
understanding involves him in the ruin of his plot. 

Shakespeare flinches at nothing: he makes Desde- 
mona kneel to lago, and sends her to her death 
without the enlightenment that comes at last to 
Othello when he discovers his hideous error. She 
could bear more than Othello, for her love had not 
wavered. There is a strange sense of triumph even 
in this appalling close. Shakespeare's treatment of 
the mystery does not much vary from tragedy to 
tragedy. In Othello the chances were all against ^he 
extreme issue ; at a dozen points in the story a slip 



208 SHAKESPEARE [chap. v. 

or an accident would have brought lago's fabric about 
his ears. Yet out of these materials, Shakespeare 
seems to say, this result may be wrought; and the 
Heavens will permit it. He points to no conclusion, 
unless it be this, that the greatest and loveliest 
virtues, surpassing the common measure, are not to 
be had for nothing. They must suffer for their great- 
ness. In life they suffer silently, without fame. In 
Shakespeare's art they are made known to us, and 
wear their crown. Desdemona and Othello are both 
made perfect in the act of death, so that the idea 
of murder is lost and forgotten in the sense of 
sacrifice. 



CHAPTEE VI 

THE LAST PHASE 

In the plays of Shakespeare's closing years there is a 
pervading sense of quiet and happiness which seems 
to bear witness to a change in the mind of their 
author. In these latest plays — Cymheline, The Winter's 
Tale, The Tempest — the subjects chosen are tragic in 
their nature, but they are shaped to a fortunate 
result. Imogen and Hermione are deeply wronged, 
like Desdemona; Prospero, like Lear, is driven from 
his inheritance ; yet the forces of destruction do not 
prevail, and the end brings forgiveness and reunion. 
There is no reversion to the manner of the Comedies ; 
this new-found happiness is a happiness wrung from 
experience, and, unlike the old high-spirited gaiety, 
it does not exult over the evil-doer. An all-embracing 
tolerance and kindliness inspires these last plays. 
The amiable rascal, for whom there was no place in 
the Tragedies, reappears. The outlook on life is 
widened ; and the children — Perdita and Florizel, 
Miranda and Ferdinand, Guiderius and Arviragns — 
are permitted to make amends for the faults and 
misfortunes of their parents. There is still tragic 
material in plenty, and there are some high-wrought 
tragic scenes ; but the tension is soon relaxed ; in two 
of the plays the construction is loose and rambling ; 
in all three there is a free rein given to humour and 
fantasy. It is as if Shakespeare were weary of the 
p 209 



210 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

business of the drama, and cared only to indulge his 
whim. He was at the top of his profession, and was 
no longer forced to adapt himself to the narrower 
conventions of the stage. He might write what he 
liked, and he made full use of his hard-earned liberty. 

The sense of relief which comes with these last 
plays, after the prolonged and heightened anguish of 
the Tragedies, seems to suggest the state of con- 
valescence, when the mind wanders among happy 
memories, and is restored to a delight in the sim- 
plest pleasures. The scene is shifted, for escape from 
the old jealousies of the Court, to an enchanted island, 
or to the mountains of Wales, or to the sheep-walks of 
Bohemia, where the life of the inhabitants is a peaceful 
round of daily duties and rural pieties. The very 
structure of the plays has the inconsequence of reverie : 
even The Tempest, while it observes the mechanical 
unities, escapes from their tyranny by an appeal to 
supernatural agencies, which in a single day can do 
the work of years. All these characteristics of matter 
and form point to the same conclusion, that the dark- 
ness and burden of tragic suffering gave place, in the 
latest works that Shakespeare wrote for the stage, to 
daylight and ease. 

The Tragedies must be reckoned his greatest 
achievement, so that it may sound paradoxical to 
speak of the sudden change from Tragedy to Eomance 
as if it betokened a recovery from disease. Yet no 
man can explore the possibilities of suffering, as 
Shakespeare did, to the dark end, without peril to his 
own soul. The instinct of self-preservation keeps 
most men from adventuring near to the edge of the 
abyss. The inevitable pains of life they will nerve 
themselves to endure, but they are careful not to 
multiply them by imagination, lest their strength 



VI.] THE LAST PHASE 211 

should fail. For many years Shakespeare took upon 
himself the burden of the human race, and struggled 
in thought under the oppression of sorrows not his 
own. That he turned at last to happier scenes, and 
wrote the Romances, is evidence, it may be said, that 
his grip on the hard facts of life was loosened by 
fatigue, and that he sought refreshment in irrespon- 
sible play. And this perhaps is true ; but the marvel 
is that he ever won his way back into a world where 
play is possible. He was not unscathed by the ordeal : 
the smell of the fire had passed on him. There are 
many fearful passages in the Tragedies, where the 
reader holds his breath, from sympathy with Shake- 
speare's characters and apprehension of the madness 
that threatens them. But there is a far worse terror 
when it begins to appear that Shakespeare himself is 
not aloof and secure ; that his foothold is precarious 
on the edge that overlooks the gulf. In King Lear 
and Timoii of Athens and Hamlet there is an unmis- 
takable note of disgust and disaffection towards the 
mere fact of sex ; and the same feeling expresses itself 
faintly, with much distress and uncertainty, in Measure 
for Measure. It is true that the dramatic cause of this 
disaffection is supplied in each case ; Lear's daughters 
have turned against him, Timon's curses are ostensibly 
provoked by special instances of ingratitude and cruelty 
and lust, Hamlet's mind is preoccupied with the horror 
of his mother's sin. But the passion goes far beyond its 
occasion, to condemn, or to question, all the business 
and desire of the race of man. The voice that we 
have learned to recognise as Shakespeare's is heard, in 
its most moving accents, blaspheming the very founda- 
tions of life and sanity. Those who cannot find in the 
Sonnets any trace of personal feeling may quite well 
maintain that here too the passion is simulated ; but 



212 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

the great majority of readers, who, holding no theories, 
are yet vaguely aware of Shakespeare's presence and 
control, will recognise what is meant by this worst 
touch of fear. Some, recognising it, have conceived of 
Shakespeare as a man whose mind was unbalanced 
by an excess of emotional sensibility. The excess 
may be allowed ; it is the best part of his wealth ; but 
it must not be taken to imply defect and poverty 
elsewhere. We do not and cannot know enough of 
his life even to guess at the experiences which may 
have left their mark on the darkest of his writings. 
We do know that only a man of extraordinary strength 
and serenity of temper could have emerged from these 
experiences unspoilt. Many a life has been wrecked on 
a tenth part of the accumulated suffering which finds a 
voice in the Tragedies. The Romances are our warrant 
that Shakespeare regained a perfect calm of mind. If 
Timon of Athens had been his last play, who could feel 
any assurance that he died at peace with the world ? 

The retirement to Stratford cut him off from the 
society of writers of books ; and, incidentally, cut us off 
from our last and best opportunity of overhearing his 
talk. If he had continued in London, and had gathered 
a school of younger men around him, we should have 
heard something of him from his disciples. He pre- 
ferred the more homely circle of Stratford; and he 
founded no school. Doubtless, when he was giving up 
business, he made over some of his unfinished work 
to younger men, with liberty to piece it out. It has 
been confidently asserted that he collaborated with 
John Fletcher both in Henry VII L, w^hich appears in 
the Folio, and in TJie Two JSfoble Kinsmen, which was 
published as Fletcher's work. For this partnership 
of Shakespeare's the evidence, though it consists 
wholly of a comparison of styles, is stronger than 



VI.] THE LAST PHASE 213 

for any other ; and Fletcher was as apt a pupil 
as could have been found for so impossible a 
master. But the master must have known that 
he had nothing to teach which could be effectively 
learned. Schools are founded by believers in 
method ; he trusted solely to the grace of imagina- 
tion, and indulged himself, year by year, in wilder 
and more daring experiments. His work, when it is 
not inspired, is not even remarkable. Artists of his 
kind, if they are so unfortunate as to find a following, 
attract only superstitious and week-kneed aspirants, 
who cannot understand that every real thing is 
liker to every other real thing than to the closest 
and most reverent imitation of itself. Shakespeare 
baffled all imitators by his speed and inexhaustible 
variety. His early comedies might perhaps be 
brought within the compass of a formula, though the 
volatile essence which is their soul would escape in the 
process. His historical plays observe no certain laws, 
either of history or of the drama. The attempt to 
find a theoretic basis for the great tragedies has never 
been attended with the smallest success: man is 
greater than that mode of his thought which is 
called philosophy, as the whole is greater than a 
part ; and the Shakespearean drama is an instrument 
of expression incomparably fuller and richer than 
the tongs and the bones of moralists and meta- 
physicians. In his last plays, so far from relaxing 
the energy of his invention, he outwent himself in 
fertility and reach. These are the plays which are 
described in Johnson's eulogy : 

Each change of many-coloured life he drew, 
Exhausted worlds, and then imagined new ; 
Existence saw him spurn her bounded reign, 
And panting Time toiled after him in vain. 



214 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

The brave new world of his latest invention is rich in 
picture and memory — shipwreck, battle, the simple 
funeral of Fidele, the strange adventures of Autolycus, 
the dances of shepherdesses on the rustic lawn, and of 
fairies on the yellow sands — but the boldest stroke of 
his mature power is seen in his creation of a new 
mythology. In place of the witches and good people 
of the popular belief, who had already played a part 
in his drama, he creates spirits of the earth and of the 
air, the freckled hag-born whelp Caliban, the beautiful 
and petulant Ariel, both of them subdued to the 
purposes of man, who is thus made master of his fate 
and of the world. The brain that devised The Tempest 
was not unstrung by fatigue. 

The style of these last plays is a further develop- 
ment of the style of the Tragedies. The thought is 
often more packed and hurried, the expression more 
various and fluent, at the expense of full logical order- 
ing. The change which came over Shakespeare's 
later work is that which Dryden, at an advanced 
age, perceived in himself. " What judgment I had," 
he says, in the Preface to the Fables, " increases rather 
than diminishes ; and thoughts, such as they are, 
come crowding in so fast upon me, that my only 
difiiculty is to choose or to reject, to run them into 
verse, or to give them the other harmony of prose." 
The bombasted magniloquence of the early rhetorical 
style has now disappeared. The very syntax is the 
syntax of thought rather than of language ; con- 
structions are mixed, grammatical links are dropped, 
the meaning of many sentences is compressed into one, 
hints and impressions count for as much as full-blown 
propositions. An illustration of this late style may be 
taken from the scene in The Tempest, where Antonio, 
the usurping Duke of Milan, tries to persuade 



VI.] THE LAST PHASE 215 

Sebastian to murder his brother Alonso, and to seize 
upon the kingdom of Naples. Ferdinand, the heir to 
the kingdom, is believed to have perished in the ship- 
wreck, and Antonio points to the sleeping king : 

Ant. Who 's the next heir of Naples ? 

Seb. ClaribeL 

Ant. She that is Queen of Tunis ; she that dwells 
Ten leagues beyond man's life ; she that from Naples 
Can have no note, unless the Sun were post, 
(The man i' th' moon 's too slow) till new-born chins 
Be rough and razorable ; she that from whom 
"We all were sea-swallow' d, though some cast again, 
And by that destiny to perform an act 
Whereof what 's past is prologue ; what to come 
In yours and my discharge. 

Here is a very huddle of thoughts, tumbled out as 
they present themselves, eagerly and fast. This 
crovrded utterance is not proper to any one character ; 
Leontes in his jealous speculations, Imogen in her 
questions addressed to Pisanio, Prospero in his narra- 
tive to Miranda, all speak in the same fashion, 
prompted by the same scurry of thought. It would 
be right to conclude, from the mere reading, that 
there was no blot in the papers to which these speeches 
were committed. 

This later style of Shakespeare, as it is seen in the 
Tragedies and Romances, is perhaps the most wonder- 
ful thing in English literature. From the hrst he was 
a lover of language, bandying words like tennis-balls, 
adorning his theme "with many holiday and lady 
terms," proving that a sentence is but a cheveril glove 
to a good wit, so quickly the wrong side may be turned 
outward. He had a mint of phrases in his brain, an 
exchequer of words ; he had fed of the dainties that 
are bred in a book ; his speech was a very fantastical 



216 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

banquet. This early practice gave him an assured 
mastery, so that when his thoughts multiplied and 
strengthened, he was able to express himself. There 
has never been a writer who came nearer to giving 
adequate verbal expression to the subtlest turns of 
consciousness, the flitting shadows and half-conceived 
ideas and purposes which count for so much in the life 
of the mind — which determine action, indeed, although 
they could not be rationally formulated by a lawyer 
as a plea for action. His language, it is true, is often 
at its simplest when the thought is most active. So 
in Macbeth's question : 

But wherefore could not I pronounce Amen ? 
I had most need of blessing, and Amen 
Stuck in my throat. 

So in Othello's reply to Desdemona's plea for respite — 
"being done, there is no pause'' — a reply which, 
better than a long discourse, explains that the crisis 
in Othello's mind is over, and the deed itself is a mere 
consequence of that agon^^ But where the situation 
allows of it, Shakespeare's wealth of expression is be- 
wildering in its flow and variety. Ideas, metaphors, 
analogies, illustrations, crowd into his mind, and the 
pen cannot drive fast enough to give them full expres- 
sion. He tumbles his jewels out in a heap, and does 
not spend labour on giving to any of them an elaborate 
setting. " His mind and hand went together," but his 
mind went the faster. 

His was the age before the Academies, when the 
processes of popular and literary education had not 
yet multiplied definitions and hardened usages. There 
is truth in the common saying that the English 
language was still fluid in the time of Queen Elizabeth. 
No man^ even if he had the mind to do it, would now 



VI.] THE LAST PHASE 217 

dare to write like Shakespeare. The body of pre- 
cedent has been enormously increased; science and 
controversy have been bnsy, year after year, limiting 
and distinguishing the meanings of words, for the sake 
of exactness and uniformity. Hence, although even 
the most original of writers cannot very seriously 
modify the language that he uses, Shakespeare enjoyed 
a freedom of invention unknown to his successors. 
He coins words lavishly, and assigns new meanings to 
old forms. He knows nothing of the so-called parts of 
speech ; where he lacks a verb he will make it from 
the first noun or adjective that comes to hand. The 
more or less precise significations which are now 
attached to certain Latin prefixes and suffixes are all 
disordered and mixed in his use of them. He violates 
almost every grammatical rule, and, in accordance 
with what is, after all, the best English usage, neglects 
formal concord in the interests of a vaguer truth of 
impression. The number and person of a verb, in his 
English, are regulated by the meaning of the subject, 
not by its grammatical form. His language is often 
too far-fetched, and owes too much to books, to be 
called colloquial ; but the syntax and framework of his 
sentences have all the freedom of the most impulsive 
speech. 

A few examples, the first that present themselves, 
may serve to illustrate these general remarks. A 
sufficient treatise on Shakespeare's English is still to 
seek, and the New English Dictiojiary, which has done 
more than any other single work to supply the need, 
is not yet complete. Moreover, although the first 
recorded occurrence of a word or meaning often be- 
longs to Shakespeare, it is impossible, in any given 
case, to prove that he was the first inventor. But the 
cumulative evidence for his inventive habit is irre- 



218 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

sistible. He calls a nun a " cloystress," and a party 
of seekers " questrists " or " questants." Terminations 
are fitted as they come; "ruby," "rubied," and 
"rubious" are all used adjectively ; "irregular" is 
varied by " irregulous," " temporal " by " temporary," 
"distinction" by " distinguishment," and "con- 
spirator " by " conspirer." " Stricture," " prompture," 
and " expressure " are used severally to mean what 
would now be conveyed by " strictness," " prompting," 
and " expression." He strikes out, at a sudden need, 
words like " opposeless " and " vastidity," " upright- 
eously " and " inaidible." He coins diminutives as he 
needs them, "smilets" and "crownets." He borrows 
words from the French, like "esperance" and"oeillade" 
(boldly Anglicised as " eliad "), and from the German, 
as where he speaks of Ophelia's virgin " crants." 
Perhaps this last word was unintelligible to the 
audience ; it occurs in the Quarto, but is altered in 
the Eolio to "rites." There are no earlier recorded 
occurrences of " allottery " (in the sense of " portion "), 
" forgetive," " confixed," "' eventful," and very many 
other Avords. The meaning that he assigns to words 
seems often to be a meaning of his own devising. 
" Unquestionable " he uses in the sense of averse to 
conversation. In Measure for Measure, Angelo, affianced 
to Mariana, is spoken of as " her combinate husband." 
The Duke, when he excuses his failure to appear 
against Angelo, says that he is " combined by a sacred 
vow," and so must needs be absent. Sometimes 
Shakespeare misuses a word from mistaking its 
etymology : he uses " fedary " or " federary " in the 
sense of accomplice, not of vassal. He obtains a 
wonderful expressiveness even from his wildest licence. 
A good many instances might be gathered from his 
work to illustrate his curiously impressionist use of 



VI.] THE LAST PHASE 219 

language ; he tested a word, it seems, by the ear, and, 
if it sounded right, accepted it without further scrutiny. 
lago, in his advice to Roderigo, speaking of Desde- 
mona's affection to the Moor, says : " It was a violent 
commencement in her, and thou shalt see an answer- 
able sequestration ; put but money in thy purse." 
AA^iat does he mean by " sequestration " ? No doubt 
the main part of his meaning is the natural and right 
meaning of separation, divorce. But the sentence is 
antithetically constructed, and " sequestration " serves 
well enough, from its accidental suggestion of 
" sequence " and " sequel," to set over against " com- 
mencement." This is not a scholar's use of language; 
but it has a magic of its own. 

A like brilliant effect is often obtained by the 
coinage of verbs. What could be more admirable 
than Cleopatra's description of Octavia ? 

Your wife Octavia, with her modest eyes, 
And still conclusion, shall acquire no honour 
Demuring upon me. 

Or, for a last instance of the triumph of wilfulness, it 
will suffice to take any of the familiar nouns which 
are used as verbs by Shakespeare. He twice uses 
" woman " as a verb, but not twice in the same sense. 
Cassio, in OtfieUo, orders Bianca to leave him : 

I do attend here on the General, 

And think it no addition, nor my wish, 

To have him see me woman'd. 

The Countess, in All 's Well, says : 

I have felt so many quirks of joy and grief, 
That the first face of neither, on the start, 
Can woman me unto 't. 



220 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

The word " child " is used with the same freedom ; 
Lear is sympathetically described by Edgar — " he 
childed as I father'd " ; the autumn is '^ the childing 
autumn"; Polixenes in The Wiiiter^s Tale tells how 

his son, 

With his varying childness cures in me 
Thoughts that would thick my blood. 

The build of Shakespeare's earlier verse, with its 
easy flow of rhythm and observance of the pause at the 
end of the line, favoured clear syntax. Yet there are 
instances in the earlier plays of that confused and 
condensed manner which obscures a simple thought by 
overlaying it with the metaphors that it happens to 
suggest. This acceptance of all that passes through, 
the mind became more and more characteristic of 
Shakespeare's style : he avoids it, at his best, not by 
careful revision, and rejection on a second reading, but 
by heating his imagination till it refuses what cannot 
be perfectly assimilated on the instant. Where he is 
deliberate and languid, he is often obscure. This is 
how the King, in Lovers Labour 's Lost, expresses the 
not very complex idea that decisions are often forced 
upon us by the lapse of time : 

The extreme parts of time extremely forms 

All causes to the purpose of his speed, 

And often at his very loose decides 

That which long process could not arbitrate. 

Gratiano, in The Merchant of Venice, is entangled in 
his effort to say that silence is often mistaken for 
wisdom : 

O my Antonio, I do know of these 

That therefore only are reputed wise, 

For saying nothing ; when, I am very sure. 

If they should speak, would almost damn those ears. 

Which hearing them would call their brothers fools. 



VI.] THE LAST PHASE 221 

Even worshippers of Shakespeare will agree that 
this is no way to write English. In the later plays 
elliptical syntax becomes commoner, though the mean- 
ing is usually tighter packed. When Polixenes, in 
The Winters Tale, is pressed by Leontes to prolong his 
visit, he excuses himself in this fashion : 

I am question' d by my fears, of what may chance, 
Or breed upon our absence, that may blow 
No sneaping winds at home, to make us say, 
This is put forth too truly. 

No grammatical analysis of this sentence is possible, 
yet its meaning is hardly doubtful. The fears of the 
first line are made to imply hopes in the second, and, 
in the fourth, are alluded to in the singular number as 
a feeling of apprehension. Passages like this are 
legion, and are, for the most part, easily understood at 
a first glance. He who runs may read, when he who 
stands and ponders is strangled by the grammatical 
intricacies. In their slow-witted efforts to regularise 
the text of Shakespeare, the grammarians have 
steadily corrupted it, even while they have heaped 
scorn on the heads of the first editors for presenting 
them with what Shakespeare wrote. 

If there is one mark which more than another dis- 
tinguishes Shakespeare's mature style from all other 
writing whatsover, it is his royal wealth of metaphor. 
He always loved the high figurative fashion, and in his 
early writing he was sometimes patient with a figure, 
elaborating it with care, to make it go upon all fours. 
So Thurio, in The Two Gentlemeri, explains to Proteus, 
by a simile taken from the spinning of flax, how 
Silvia's love may be transferred from Valentine to 
himself : 

Therefore, as you unwind her love from him, 
Lest it should ravel, and be good to none. 



222 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

You must provide to bottom it on me : 
Whicla must be done by praising me as much 
As you in worth dispraise Sir Valentine. 

When a figure is thus carefully worked out in detail, 
it becomes cold and conceited : things are not so like 
one another as to be fitted in all their parts, and the 
process of fitting them takes the attention away from 
the fact to be illustrated, which would remain signifi- 
cant, even if the world furnished no comparison for it. 
Something of this chill mars the speeches of Arthur, in 
King JoliUy when he pleads with Hubert for his life. 
The fire, he says, is dead with grief : 

There is no malice in this burning coal; 

The breath of heaven hath blown his spirit out, 

And strew' d repentant ashes on his head. 

When Hubert offers to revive it, Arthur continues : 

And if you do, you will but make it blush, 
And glow with shame of your proceedings, Hubert ; 
Nay, it perchance will sparkle in your eyes ; 
And, like a dog that is compell'd to fight, 
Snatch at his master that doth tarre him on. 

In Shakespeare's mature work elaborated figures of 
this kind do not occur. His thought presses on from 
metaphor to metaphor, any one of them more than good 
enough for a workaday poet ; he strings them together, 
and passes them rapidly before the eye, each of them 
bringing its glint of colour and suggestion. His so-called 
mixed metaphors are not mixed, but successive ; the 
sense of mixture is produced by a rapidity of thought 
in the writer which baffles the slower reader, and 
buries him under the missiles that he fails to catch. 
There are often two or three metaphors in a single 



VI.] THE LAST PHASE 223 

sentence. When lago recommends Eoderigo to wear 
a false beard, he does it in these words : 

Defeat thy favour with an usurp' d beard. 

When Lady Macbeth reproaches Macbeth for his in- 
constant mind, her scorn condenses itself in what seems 
to be, but is not, a mixture of metaphor : 

Was the hope drunk 
Wherein you drest yourself ? 

When Antony's friends desert him, his thoughts run 
through many comparisons : 

All come to this ? The hearts 
That pannelled me at heels, to whom I gave 
Their wishes, do discandy, melt their sweets 
On blossoming Caesar ; and this pine is barkt 
That overtopp'd them all. Betray 'd I am. 

If they had understood the workings of Shake- 
speare's imagination, his later editors would not have 
attempted to amend his figures by reducing them to a 
dull symmetry. When Macbeth says. 

My way of life 
Is fall'n into the sear, the yellow leaf : 

he speaks like Shakespeare. Those who read "my 
May of life " make him speak like Pope. An even 
more prosy emendation has been allowed, in many 
editions, to ruin one of the finest of Cleopatra's 
speeches : 

'T is paltry to be Caesar : 
Not being Fortune, he 's but Fortune's knave, 
A minister of her will : and it is great 
To do that thing that ends all other deeds, 
Which shackles accidents, and bolts up change ; 
Which sleeps, and never palates more the dung. 
The beggar's nurse, and Caesar's. 



224 SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

The substitution of " dug " for " dung " robs the poet 
of his sudden vision of the whole earth nourishing the 
race of man on its own corruption and decay, and robs 
him without compensation. 

Accustomed as he is to deal with concrete reality 
and live movement, Shakespeare seems to do his very 
thinking in metaphor. He is generally careful to make 
his metaphors appropriate to the speaker of them; 
and his highest reaches of imagination are often seen 
in a single figure. What a wonderful vitality and 
beauty the word " ride " gives to his description of 
Beatrice : 

Disdain and scorn ride sparkling in her eyes. 

No other speech gives us so horrible a glimpse into the 
pit of lago's soul as his own speech of reassurance to 
Eoderigo, with its summer gardening lore : 

Dost not go well ? Cassio hath beaten thee, 
And thou by that small hurt hast cashier'd Cassio : 
Though other things grow fair against the sun, 
Yet fruits that blossom first will first be ripe : 
Content thyself awhile. 

The vivid pictorial quality of Shakespeare's imagi- 
nation causes him to be dissatisfied with all forms of 
expression which are colourless and abstract. He makes 
sonorous use of the Latin vocabulary to expound and 
define his meaning ; and then he adds the more homely 
figurative word to convert all the rest into picture. 
His words are often paired in this fashion ; one gives 
the thought, the other adds the image. .So he speaks 
of "the catastrophe and heel of pastime"; the " snuff 
and loathed part of nature " ; " the descent and dust 
below thy foot " ; " the force and road of casualty " ; 
" a puff'd and reckless libertine " ; "a malignant and 
a turban'd Turk." It is this sort of writing that was 



VI.] THE LAST PHASE 225 

in Gray's mind when lie said, '' Every word in him is 
a picture." 

The very qualities which have made Shakespeare 
impossible as a teacher have also made him the wonder 
of the world. He breaks through grammar only to 
get nearer to the heart of things. The human mind is 
without doubt a very complicated mystery, alive in all 
its fibers, incalculable in many of its processes. How 
should it express itself in grammatical sentences, which 
are a creaking contrivance, made up of two parts, a 
subject and a predicate? Yet it dares the attempt; 
and Shakespeare by his freedom, and spontaneity, and 
resource, has succeeded, perhaps better than any other 
writer, in giving a voice and a body to those elusive 
movements of thought and feeling which are the life of 
humanity. 

These questions of style and grammar have been 
allowed, perhaps too easily, to intrude upon a greater 
theme. It is time to return to Shakespeare, and to 
make an end. 

The Tempest was probably his last play — in this 
sense, at least, that he designed it for his farewell to 
the stage. The thought which occurs at once to almost 
every reader of the play, that Prospero resembles 
Shakespeare himself, can hardly have been absent 
from the mind of the author. By his most potent 
art he had bedimmed the noontide sun, called forth 
the mutinous winds, and plucked up the giant trees 
of the forest. Graves at his command had waked 
their sleepers, oped, and let them forth. When at 
last he resolved to break the wand of his incanta- 
tions and to bury his magic book, he was shaken, 
as all men in sight of the end are shaken, by the 
passion of mortality. But there was no bitterness in 
the leave-taking. He looked into the future, and 



226 ' SHAKESPEARE [chap. 

there was given to him a last vision ; not the futile 
panorama of industrial progress, but a view of the 
whole world, shifting like a dream, and melting into 
vapour like a cloud. His own fate and the fate of his 
book were as nothing against that wide expanse. 
What was it to him that for a certain term of years 
men should read what he had written? The old 
braggart promises of the days of his vanity could not 
console him now. 

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments 

Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme. 

So he had written in the Sonnets. When the end drew 
near, his care was only to forgive his enemies, and to 
comfort the young, who are awed and disquieted by 
the show of grief in their elders. Miranda and Fer- 
dinand watch Prospero, as he struggles in the throes 
of imagination. Then he comes to himself and speaks : 

You do look, my son, in a mov'd sort 
As if you were dismay 'd. Be cheerful, sir ; 
Our revels now are ended. These our actors, 
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and 
Are melted into air, into thin air ; 
And like the baseless fabric of this vision, 
The cloud-capt towers, the gorgeous palaces, 
The solemn temples, the great globe itself, 
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, 
And like this insubstantial pageant faded 
Leave not a rack behind : we are such stuff 
As dreams are made on ; and our little life 
Is rounded with a sleep. 

In all the work of Shakespeare there is nothing more 
like himself than those quiet words of parting — " Be 
cheerful, sir ; our revels now are ended." 

Yet they are not ended; and the generations who 
have come after him, and have read his book, and have 



Ti.] THE LAST PHASE 221 

loved him with an inalterable personal affection, must 
each, as they pass the way that he went, pay him 
their tribute of praise. His living brood have sur- 
vived him, to be the companions and friends of men 
and women as yet unborn. His monument is still a 
feasting presence, full of light. When he was alive he 
may sometimes have smiled to think that the phantoms 
dancing in his brain were as real to him as the sights 
and sounds of the outer world. The population of 
that delicate shadowland seemed to have but a frail 
hold on existence. The one was taken, and the 
other left; this character served for a play, that 
phrase or sentence fitted a speech; the others died 
in their cradles, or lived a moment upon the air, and 
were dissolved. Those that found acceptance were 
made over to the tender mercies of the players, for a 
week's entertainment of the populace. But now three 
centuries have passed since King Lear was written; 
and we begin to rub our eyes, and wonder. " Change 
places, and, handy-dandy, which is the ghost, which 
is the man ? " Is the real man to be sought in that 
fragmentary story of Stratford and London, which, 
do what we will to revive it, has long ago grown 
faint as the memory of a last year's carouse ? That 
short and troubled time of his passage, during which 
he was hurried onward at an ever-increasing pace, 
blown upon by hopes and fears, cast down and up- 
lifted, has gone like a dream, and has taken him 
bodily along with it. But his work remains. He 
wove upon the roaring loom of Time the garment 
that we see him by ; and the earth at Stratford 
closed over the broken shuttle. 



INDEX 



Account of the Life &c. of Mr. 

William Shakespear (1709), 

Rowe, 43. 
All's Well that Unds Well, 138-9, 

147 ; basis of, 164 ; 173-4, 219. 
Antony and Cleopatra, 72, 112, 

124r-5, 144, 177, 194, 197-8; 

223. 
Apollonius and Silla (Barnabe 

Riche), 68. 
Arcadia (Sidney), 66. 
Arden, Forest of, 32. 
Arden, Mary (mother), 31 ; death 

of, 59. 
Ariosto, 75. 
As You Like It, 35 ; basis of, QQ, 

75, 101, 102, 126, 129, 176, 177. 
Aubrey, 41, 44, 48, 58. 



B 

Bandello, 162-3. 

Beeston, William, 44. 

Betterton, 43, 118. 

Boccaccio, 64, 162, 164. 

Books, List of, in a private library 

of period, 64. 
Boy players, 120, 
Brandes, Dr., 36. 
Brooke, Arthur, 4. 
Burbage, Richard (acted chief 

tragic parts in 

plays), 57, 59, 118. 
Burghley, Lord, 48-9 



Canning, a story of, 37. 

Canterbury TaZes (Chaucer), 193. 

Chapman, George, 185. 

Chronicles (Raphael Holinshed), 
47, 67, 68-9, 77, 181. 

Cinthio (Giambattista Giraldi), 
74, 162-4, 168. 

Coleridge, 4, 179, 198, 201. 

Comedies (Shakespeare's) , criti- 
cisms on, 157-61, 164, 209. 

Comedy of Errors, The, 38, 52, 
102, 142, 158. 

Condell, Henry, 23, 59, 108, 131. 
See Heminge. 

Coriolanus, 102, 192, 197. 

Critics, Romantic, 4, 152; char- 
acter studies by, 153-6; 179, 
198, 225. 

Cymheline, 47, 56, 67, 128, 140; 
Johnson's criticism on, 142; 
209. 

D 

Davenant, Sir William, 44. 

Declaration of egregious Popish 
Impostures, A (1603), 66. 

Description of England (Har- 
rison) , 47-3. 

Devil on the Highway to Heaven, 
The, 104. 

Dialogue of Dives, The, 104. 

Dorastus and Fawnia (Greene), 

66. ' 
, Dowdall, John, 44. 



229 



230 



SHAKESPEARE 



Dowden, Prof.,87,166. 

Dr. Faustus (Marlowe) , 106. 

Dryden, 21, 45, 69. 

E 

Edward 11. (Marlowe), 106, 181. 
Elizabeth (Queen) , 55. 
Elizabethan actors, versatility of, 

100. 
drama, beginnings of, 97; 

crisis of, 103. 
Essays of Elia, The (Lamb), 74. 
Essex, Earl of, 56. 
Euphues (Lyly),66. 



Fate, 15&-62, 179, 226. 
Fechter, the actor, in Othello, 145. 
Fenton, Geoffrey, 163. 
Fletcher, John, 212. 
Fortune theatre, 117. 



Garrick, David, 118, 146. 
Giraldi, Giambattista. See 

Cinthio. 
Globe theatre (Southwark), 54, 59, 

102, 115; built (1599), 117, 118. 
Goethe, 198. 
Gorbodue, first English tragedy, 

103. 
Gray, Thomas, 225. 
Greene, Robert, 103-5, 107. 
Greenwich Palace, 55. 
Groatsworth of Wit (Greene) , 104. 

H 

Hall (chronicler), 41, 69. 

Hall, John (son-in-law), 59. 

Hall, William, 86. 

Halliwell-Phillipps, Mr., 131. 

Hamlet, 7, 17, 27, 57, 85, 96, 101, 
112, 114, 123, 130, 134, 142, 147- 
48, 153-4, 159-60, 162, 169, 184, 
197, 198 ; criticisms on, 199, 211, 
218. 

Harman, Thomas, 51. 



Hathaway, Anne (wife), 42. 
Hazlitt, 81, 164. 

Hecatommithi, the (Cinthio), 74. 
Heminge, John, 23, 59, 108, 131. 

See Condell. 
Henry IV., 47, 66, 139-40, 146, 151, 

181, 183; Falstaff in, 186-90. 
Henry F., 37; dedication of, 56; 

69, 186. 
Henry VI., 47; parodied, 107-8; 

192. 
Henry VIIL, 56, 99. 
Historical Plays. (Shakespeare's) , 

180; dramatic unity of, 183; 

politics in, 181 ; 213. 



IlPeeorone (Ser Giovanni Floren- 
tine) , 74. 
Irony, dramatic, 198, 203. 



James i., 55. 

Jameson, Mrs., 179. 

Jew of Malta, The (Marlowe), 106. 

Johnson, Dr. Samuel, description 
of Savage, 11-12 ; appreciation 
by, 21 ; 22, 139, 196, 213. 

Jonson, Ben, 2, 3, 20, 23, 53, 55. 

Julius Caesar, 7, 47, 73, 121-2, 
128, 192. 



K 



Keats, 16. 

King John, 41, 59, 125, 183, 222. 

King Lear, 13, 19, 27, 53, 58, 66, 

67, 70, 77, 101, 115, 134-5, 172-3, 

195, 196, 211, 227. 
Kyd, Thomas, 105. 



Lamb, Charles, 74, 161. 

Lee, Mr. Sidney, 86. 

Lives of the Noble Grecians and 

Romans, The (Plutarch), 70-4, 

181. 



INDEX 



231 



Lodge, Thomas, 103-5. 

Loudon, City of, 1, 42, 45, 48, 52, 
56. 

taverns in, 7, 52-3. 

theatres, 100, 112; descrip- 
tion of stage, 118-19. See For- 
tune and Globe. 

Love's Labour 's Lost, 38, 39, 56, 
95, 132, 220. 

Lucy, Sir Thomas, 42. 



M 

Macbeth, 4, 17, 24, 56, 58, 67, 69- 
70, 77, 102, 123, 125, 142, 145, 
159, 175, 185, 198, 216, 223. 

Machiavel, 64, 75, 163. 

Madden, Mr. Vice-Chancellor, 34. 

Manningham, John {Diary), 57. 

Marlowe, 65, 80, 84-5, 103, 106, 
112, 160-1, 173. 

Measure for Measure, 19, 53, 55 ; 
derivation of plot, 74 ; 128, 131, 
148-9, 157 ; criticism of, 164-5, 
194, 211, 218. 

Merchant of Venice, 57; deriva- 
tion of, 74; 101, 126, 132, 134, 
150-1, 154, 157, 164, 169, 194,220. 

Meredith, George, 21. 

Meres, Francis, 86, 108. 

Merry Wives, The, 38; origin of, 
45; 56, 158; Falstafe in, 190-1. 

Midsummer Night's Dream, 32-4:, 
48, 56, 95, 96-7, 156, 160, 171, 
181-2, 195. 

Milton, 2, 21. 

Miracle Plays, 96. 

Montaigne, 75, 76. 

Montgomery, Philip, Earl of, 56. 

Moral of Man's Wit, The, 104. 

Morality Plays, 104. 

More, Hannah, 70. 

Morris dance. The, 95. 

Much Ado About Nothing, 53, 75. 
126, 139, 157, 224. 



N 

New English Dictionary, 217. 
Nine Worthies, The Pageant of 
the, 95. 

O 

Of Cannibals (Montaigne), 76. 

Orator (Silvayn), 66. 

Othello, 7, 13, 17, 58 ; derivation 
of plot, 74 ; 75, 102, 123-4, 129, 
135, 140-2, 145, 159, 162, 197, 
198, 203, 216, 219, 223, 224. 

Ovid, 38, 39, 80, 82. 



Palace of Pleasure (Painter), 67. 

Pater, Walter, 69. 

Peele, 103-5. 

Pembroke, William, Earl of, 56. 

Pericles, 53. 

Plays (Shakespeare's), First 
Folio edition of, 2, 56, 59; mis- 
leading division of, 128; 212, 
218; jesters in, 100-2, 193; 
genesis of, 108-17. 

Poetry of the period, 79-80. 

Pope, appreciation by, 21, 22, 174. 

Promos and Cassandra (George 
Whetstone), 75. 

Proverbs in Shakespeare's plays, 
78. 

Q 

Quiney, Thomas (son-in-law), 59. 



Rabelais, 75. 

Raleigh, Sir Walter, 40. 

Rape of Lucrece, The, 80-3, 85. 

Renaissance writers, 163. 

Rhetoric, Art of (Thomas Wil- 
son), 51. 

Richard IL, 17, 41, 184-6. 

Richard IIL, 57, 1S3. 

"Romances" (Shakespeare's), 
160, 211, 212. 



232 



SHAKESPEARE 



Romeo and Juliet, 4, 31, 34,68, 85, 
101-2, 116, 117, 123, 129, 131, 
184, 203. 

Rosalynde (Thomas Lodge), 66. 

S 

Scott, Sir Walter, Journal of, 
182, 206. 

Second Part of Connie-Catching, 
The, 49-50. 

Seneca, English tragedy mod- 
elled on, 103. 

Serving-man's Comfort, The, 98. 

Shakespeare, Hamnet (only son) , 
42, 59. 

John (father), 29-31. 

Judith (daughter), 42, 43, 59, 

61. 

Richard (grandfather) , 29, 

Susanna (daughter), 42, 43, 

59. 

William, appearance, 1 ; as 

man and writer, 2, 5-8, 10, 19; 
personal character 13-16; re- 
ligion, 18, 61-2, 173 ; politics, 19, 
191-3; epitaph, 20; ancestry, 
29-31 ; education, 32, 38-41, 193 ; 
ignorance of Natural History, 
35-38; youth, 42, 44; marriage 
(1582), 42; children, 42; leaves 
Stratford for London (1585), 
42-3; early years in London, 
45-6, 56-7; knowledge of the 
town, 52-3 ; of the people, 54-5 ; 
friends, 55-6; beginning of 
fame, 55; hefore royalty, 55; 
familiarity with court life, 56 ; 
acquires property at Stratford, 
58 ; annual visits to, 58 ; retires 
to, 59,212 ; death and burial, 59, 
114; his will, 59, 61; reading, 
63; favourite books, 65; Bib- 
lical knowledge, 74 ; linguistic 
knowledge, 74-5; first noticed 
as dramatist (1592), 107; at- 
tached to king's company of 
players, 117. 



Dramatic writings : Folio 
edition (1623), 2; width of out- 
look in, 20, 132, 140, 164, 171-2, 
181; contrasted with Homer, 
22; craftsmanship in, 23; ma- 
terials and methods, 26-8, 46, 
133-47, 156-7, 210; poet before 
dramatist, 63; sources of sug- 
gestion, 66-78, 162; compared 
with Montaigne, 76 ; touched by 
spirit of Renaissance, 83-4 ; cult 
of beauty, 84 ; influence of Mar- 
lowe on, 84^5 ; early efforts, 94 ; 
popular, not courtly, 106; ac- 
cused of plagiarism, 107 ; style, 
24, 113, 215, 225 ; rate of literary 
production, 114; greatest dra- 
matic period, 118; stagecraft, 
120-5; chief artistic offence, 
125; unity of impression, 125; 
comedy akin to tragedy, 130-3, 
in contact with, 182; creative 
genius, 148-51; compared with 
Chaucer, 193 ; allusions to phi- 
losophy, 195-6 ; last phase, 209 ; 
collaborates with J. Fletcher, 
212-13; wealth of expression, 
216-24; last play, 225 ; parting 
words, 226-7. See Critics and 
Plays. 

Shakespeare^ s Sonnets, Never be- 
fore Imprinted (1609), 85-94. 

Southampton, Earl of, 55, 56. 

Spanish Tragedy (Kyd), 105. 

St. George (rustic play), 95. 

Stopes, Mrs., 31. 

Stratford, 29-48, 58-9; dramatic 
opportunities of, 95, 96, 97. 

Suckling, Sir John, 2. 

Surrey, Earl of, 79. 



Tamburlaine (Marlowe), 105. 
Taming of a Shrew, The, 110 ; by 
whom written, 111-12, 114. 



INDEX 



233 



Taming of the Shreio, The, 31, 52, 

110, 156. 
Tarlton, Richard, 99-100. 
Tempest, The, 53, 56, 76, 209, 210, 

214-15, 225-6. 
Thorpe, Thomas, 86, 87, 89. 
Timon of Athens, 73, 112-14, 115, 

191, 211. 
Titus Andronicus, 84, 108, 125. 
Tragedies (Shakespeare's), criti- 
cism on, 193-208, 210-12. 
Troilus and Cressida, 24-5; style 

of, 115-17 ; 129, 131, 171, 201. 
Twelve Labours of Hercules, 

The, 104. 
Twelfth Night, 62, 56 ; derivation 

of, 68 ; 100, 101, 123, 136-7, 159, 

160, 194. 
Two Gentlemen of Verona, The, 

36, 136, 173, 221-2. 



Two Noble Kinsmen, The (Fletch- 
er), 212-13. 

U 

University Wits, 80, 103-4, 107. 

V 
Venus and Adonis, 35, 39; suc- 
cess of, 55 ; 80-5. 

W 

Ward, John, 22, 44, 58. 
Whetstone, George, 148. 
Winter's Tale, The, 42; basis of 

plot, 66, 68, 129, 137-8, 140, 209, 

220, 221. 
Women in Shakespeare's plays, 

31-2, 82, 135, 152-3, 155-6, 168- 

71, 173-80, 205-8; none on 

public stage, 119. 
Wordsworth, 84. 



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"It is encouraging to come across a volume Of essays like 
these, which do not merely skim the surface of their sub- 
jects, but penetrate deep into the general heart of iiian."-^ 
Philadelphia Fress. 

Essays which seek the sources of inspiration to ideaHsm 
in poetry, poUtics, and religion, and of inspiration to the 
higher life of the spirit. 

Makers of Literature 

Being Essays on Shelley, Landor, Brownings Byron, Arnold, 
Coleridge, Lowell, Whittier, and others. 

Cloth 12mo $1.50 

"It is a service to students of the best in literature to 
commend to them the ideas and the guidance of these 
remarkable appreciations. They are examples of the broad 
and diverse range of equipment whichf^he true critic must 
possess — the natural gift, the wide and delicate sympathy, 
the knowledge of literature and systems of thought, the 
firm grasp of the fundamental principles, vivified and 
illumined if possible by the poet's insight and his divination 
of the heart of man." ^ — Ntw York Evening Post. 



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